


The Last Long Road

by chelesedai (fikgirl), fikgirl



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV), Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst, Bromance, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Damon Salvatore & Alaric Saltzman Friendship, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Horror, Hybrids, Original Character(s), Post-Apocalypse, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Vampires, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:59:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 42,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1272583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fikgirl/pseuds/chelesedai, https://archiveofourown.org/users/fikgirl/pseuds/fikgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world doesn't mean the end of the line. The Mystic Falls survivors of a fatal worldwide virus leave home seeking others and trying to eek out a new sort of survival in a world where the dead walk and the end is only the beginning.</p><p>A loose fusion with AMC's The Walking Dead. Story takes place in that world, but is not a crossover and will feature no characters from The Walking Dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. so eden sank to grief

**Author's Note:**

> This story begins post-season two of The Vampire Diaries and goes AU from there. It started as my Nanowrimo project one year, and I've slowly been adding to it and growing it since. It's a loose fusion with AMC's The Walking Dead.
> 
> The relationships in this work will build slowly, the rating may change, and so might the characters as the story progresses.
> 
> I will try to post two chapters per week as I re-read and edit them, but there's no set schedule due to a rather full and busy real life. Thanks in advance for reading!

Summer comes and for the first time in a year, they try to pretend that things are normal. Nothing has changed and there is no way that their lives can be described as remotely normal, but they pretend. Even though Jenna is dead and Stefan is still missing, on the run or kidnapped or following Klaus around like a compelled little puppy; even if Tyler has to be locked in the Lockwood vault when the moon rises high and full in the sky and Caroline is still a vampire.  They’re pretending that it doesn’t matter that Elena spends as much time at the Salvatore Boarding House as she does at her own, and Alaric is drunk on the couch half the time that she is there and won’t take a bedroom no matter how often she offers it to him; even if Bonnie did annoy a hundred dead witches to bring her boyfriend back to life and they’re never ever really normal.  
  
They fake it.  
  
Halfway through summer, Caroline declares “Road trip!” and Bonnie and Elena embrace the idea because that’s what you do when you’re seventeen and you’ve spent a year dealing with homicidal vampires, learning witchcraft, and cowering in fear of an Original vampire. Because they all need to get away from Mystic Falls and it doesn’t matter at all where they’re going as long as it’s ‘anywhere but here.’  
  
Caroline decides that they’re going to take a college tour because now is the time to start thinking about these things because they’re not going to be seniors forever. She spins a tale of Stefan coming home and he and Elena doing the cutesy ‘off-to-college’ thing together and points out how Bonnie’s grades will get whatever she wants and wherever she wants and that Jeremy will follow along like a little puppy. Which makes Elena alternately squirm and smirk, and Bonnie can’t really blame her for that because it’s still a little weird making out with Elena’s little brother, and it’s one of those times when they don’t eat ice cream and talk about those more intimate details.  
  
Damon scoffs at their plans while Alaric tells them it’s a good idea. Tyler hangs around trying to get a tag-along invite and Jeremy comments that he wishes he hadn’t taken that job at the Grille. Caroline kiboshes the boys before they even get started, pointing out that it’s “ladies only” and promises that they’ll all come back safe and sound and that she won’t let any college frat boys get their hands on Bonnie. Alaric points out that there won’t be many frat boys around in the middle of summer. Damon makes some comment about Bonnie and her mojo, but it’s under his breath and halfway to complimentary so only earns a mild glare from Elena and Caroline.  
  
Jeremy doesn’t look relieved until Bonnie gives him a hug and they sneak off to his room. Where sneaking means walking right up the stairs hand-in-hand under the watchful eyes of his sister and her best friends with Alaric hovering because he doesn’t quite know how to do the guardian thing or even if he should.  
  
Before they leave, Damon lectures Caroline and she gets pissed off that he thinks she can’t protect Elena, but then Alaric makes sure the tires are inflated and Tyler makes sure they have triple-A and that their bags are loaded in the trunk, sodas are in a cooler and a bag of potato chips is wedged between the front seats. They’re off with laughter and loud music and Bonnie and Elena catch each other looking back in the rear view and laugh their asses off as Caroline peels off the down the road.  
  
Normal, so, so very normal.  
  
Caroline, as it turns out, has plans. She has a future laid out, and she shares it with Bonnie and Elena as Bonnie stretches out in the backseat and Elena barks at her to mind her driving and the road.  
  
“Only one of us is going to live forever!” Elena cries out, cringing with a hand on the dashboard and another on the seat belt. It’s a bump along their road of Denial and Caroline’s face falls. Bonnie shifts in her seat ready to interject, and Elena bites her lip and looks ready to apologize when Caroline simply shakes it off.  
  
“But we’re all going to live like normal girls for the week!” Caroline does slow down, though, at least temporarily. It doesn’t stop Elena from nabbing the backseat when they stop at a rest stop and shoving Bonnie up front with Caroline. Doesn’t stop Bonnie from sticking her tongue out at Elena in the side mirror or stop Elena from pulling a face in return.  
  
They eat Oreos, wave at a trucker and when they stop at a truck stop for an early dinner, they sit on the hood of the car while Caroline drinks her blood from a pink and yellow flowered thermos. They might have detoured, but Caroline is back laying out her life plan: how she’ll get her Bachelor’s and her Masters and be that girl that everyone envies because she looks so young.  
  
“A little bit of proper make up magic, and I can get all the way to twenty-two,” Caroline announces as she steals one of Elena’s onion rings - because no one has to worry about boyfriends to kiss - and dips it in her chocolate milkshake making Bonnie frown.  
  
“Eww,” Bonnie says on command because it’s what she says every time Caroline does that, and what she’s been saying for years.  
  
“You should try it,” Caroline enthuses. Another onion ring goes in, Elena’s hand belatedly smacking at empty air as she tries to counter vampire reflexes, and then Caroline dangles the grossness in front of Bonnie’s face. “Mmmmm ....”  
  
The restroom is busy when they stop in before heading out, and Elena comments that she really hopes it’s not food poisoning. It’s too late to see the campus when they get there, so they get a room at a motel, order greasy pizza and watch a pay-per-view romantic comedy because there’s more than enough drama, mystery and horror in their lives.  
  
Campus is dead when they get there the next day. Even for summer, the place is deserted. In the main office they learn that the campus is all but shut down. The receptionist who looks more than a little peaked and pale tells them that there’s some summer bug that’s being incredibly vicious. It’s leaving few standing in its wake and more than three-quarters of the auxiliary staff is out sick.  
  
They show themselves around but it’s not quite the same. The eerie quiet of the campus coffeehouse - one barista and a handful of students lounging around - decides for them that it’s time to move onward.  
  
Bonnie’s phone chirps a text message as they’re climbing in the car, and she looks down, expecting Jeremy. Instead it’s Damon.  
  
_Come home now. We need your witchiness._  
  
“Jeremy missing you already?” Elena teases.  
  
Bonnie frowns and shakes her head, fingers already sending a message back to Damon. “It’s Damon.”  
  
Elena’s face falls, goes from surprised to jealous to worried in three seconds flat. Because no matter how much she loves Stefan, everyone with a set of eyes can see she has a thing for Damon. Yet, even she knows that Damon and Bonnie aren’t the social hanger out types. If Damon is texting Bonnie - and vice versa - it’s not a good thing. “What . . . what does he want?”  
  
“Is it Klaus?” Caroline looks anxiously between her friends and her cell phone is already out.  
  
Bonnie’s text is returned via the ringing of her telephone. She answers on the first ring, “What’s going on, Damon? Is it Klaus?”  
  
“ _No_ ,” the older Salvatore’s voice comes through with a touch of annoyance as though wondering why she would ask such a thing. _“Don’t you think I would have told you if it were Klaus?”_  
  
‘Not Klaus,’ Bonnie mouths to Elena and Caroline and watches her friend’s shoulders visibly relax. “Then what is it?”  
  
_“Everyone is getting sick.”_  
  
Bonnie smiles. It’s a light smile, a soft one, her mouth twitching and then she laughs. “Everyone is getting sick?”  
  
It takes a moment, but then Caroline rolls her eyes and tosses her hands up in the air. Elena shakes her head and giggles.  
  
_“I can hear the laughter, but it’s not funny. This is serious. **Everyone** is getting sick. Everyone in Mystic Falls is getting sick.”_  
  
There’s something in Damon’s voice that sobers her. With her vampire hearing, Caroline sobers as well and Elena looks between them.  
  
“What? What did he say?”  
  
Caroline shakes her head. She’s already there - at the place Damon had to be going when he texted Bonnie. “No. That’s not possible. It can’t be a magical sickness, can it?”  
  
They’re standing in the middle of a near lifeless college town. Not a car, bicycle or pedestrian has passed them.  
  
Stranger things have happened. They know because they’ve lived them.  
  
“We’re coming home,” Bonnie tells Damon, without looking at Carolina or Elena for confirmation. Just like that, their roadtrip and 'normal girls' week is over because this is what their lives have become and it's what they always do.  
  
\----  
  
By the time they reach the town limits of Mystic Falls, Caroline is driving like the devil himself is on their asses, Bonnie isn’t arguing and Elena is in no condition to chastise. It hit Elena two hours into the drive on the way home. They stopped by the same rest stop that they did on the way out, only this time it was littered with people sleeping off sickness in their cars, truck drivers stumbling bleary eyed and flushed out of showers to sleep in their cars.  
  
Elena went to splash water on her face and almost tumbled into the sink. She was dizzy and cold, and by the time they got her into the car, all she wanted to do was sleep.  
  
Now with her head resting in Bonnie’s lap, she’s shivering and sweating and burning hot to the touch. Caroline has the nearly empty road to herself but they still can’t get Elena to the Gilbert house quickly enough.  
  
Damon takes one look at the girl, being carried on Caroline’s back like she weighs no more than a football - and really, for the vampire she probably doesn’t - and blanches. Before Caroline can say a word, Damon has Elena in arms and has whisked her up to her bed. With a quick word to Alaric and Jeremy, Caroline and Bonnie bound back out the door to get Bonnie’s grimoire.  
  
It’s an effort in futility. The mass illness that’s sweeping through Mystic Falls and the region isn’t just sweeping through Mystic Falls and the region. It’s everywhere, world wide and while every infectious disease expert in the world is trying to figure out where it came from and what caused it, no one is close to any answers.  
  
It’s not magical, so Bonnie trades shifts with Caroline, Alaric and Jeremy to take care of Elena who’s slid into a semi-coma. The hospitals are full, the sick are being told to stay home and the first reports of death come three days later. With a quiet, grim glance at Alaric and Damon, Bonnie turns off the television before Jeremy wanders back into the room.  
  
Damon tries blood. It doesn’t work for Elena, or Sheriff Forbes when she takes ill, or Jeremy when he starts to show symptoms.  
  
Bonnie plays nursemaid and caretaker. She and Alaric trade shifts and Damon visits the empty grocery stores and cooks dinners. Carol Lockwood and Tobias Fell are the first Mystic Falls casualties and the death toll is climbing around the world. Bonnie turns off the television and they play cards instead of watching the news that night.  
  
At the first hint of dizziness, Bonnie hides it. Elena needs her. Jeremy needs her.  
  
“You’re sick,” Damon confronts her when she tries to sneak a break and rest her head on the counter between spooning out soup that Elena and Jeremy spend more times spitting out and throwing up than actually eating.  
  
“I’m fine,” Bonnie argues. Because she has to be. Someone has to be.  
  
“You’re useless if you’re sick.”  
  
“I’m _**fine**_ ,” Bonnie stubbornly repeats, but she doesn’t know why she’s arguing and she’s not sure what that shattering sound is or how the soup landed on her feet instead of in the bowl.  
  
Then the lights go out and world collapses in on her.  
  
\---  
  



	2. dawn goes down to day

Bonnie dreams.  
  
Fever dreams are what her Grams called them, those long endless streams of dream sequences that weave themselves haphazardly together but don’t actually go anywhere. Doors that open into long buried memories of the past or glimpses of a the future. Dreams, the likes of which she hasn’t had since Coach Tanner’s death. Winding hallways and up and down staircases that end in rooms to nowhere or chasms to everywhere that aren’t unlike an Escher painting.  
  
_Grams bakes in those days before her mother walked out of her life and the kitchen is warm and smells of sugar and cinnamon. She has lopsided pony tails and a missing tooth and her mother dots cake batter on her nose while her father watches from the doorway and she asks if maybe Santa will really finally bring her a pony this year. . ._  
  
“The witch is as good as dead,” Damon’s loud and vicious as he glares down Caroline but her friend shakes her head, eyes defiant as she glares at the older vampire whose blood made her what she is.  
  
_Twisting corridors and the door to Elena’s bedroom opens to the trio of girls at thirteen, painting toe nails and trying on Elena’s bra because she was the first to get breasts while Bonnie got braces and all Caroline ever needed was a bright smile and those blonde bouncy curls . . ._  
  
“I won’t leave her,” Caroline argues and she takes Damon’s suitcase and throws it across the room. “You won’t leave us!”  
  
_Out the window to land on the ground beside Jenna’s grave and Elena dressed in black, holding Jeremy’s hand tight even though it didn’t happen that way and when they look at her, dark eyes so solemn, her heart breaks and she wants to beg them not to leave her but they’re fading fast before her eyes and the ground is slipping beneath her feet . . ._  
  
Alaric hovers and presses a cloth to her forehead and then there’s something warm and salty in her mouth and she chokes on it more than she drinks it but somehow it settles warm in her belly and his words float like a near tether as she tries to hold onto this dream, “She’s getting better . . .”  
  
_“I’m so proud of you,” Grams tells her, pulling a brush through her hair. She’s dressed like she was for her funeral and the brush is the one Bonnie keeps in a box under her bed, but she still smells like Grams, all spicy and warm and her hands are strong, though they are cold. Her eyes are filled with love and she presses her cheek to Bonnie’s in the mirror. “The road is long and hard, but you can do this. You’re stronger than you ever thought . . .”_  
  
_She skins her knee when she falls off her bike at seven and it peels down to the layer of white skin beneath and she doesn’t cry, even as she limps all the way home and Matt waves sadly at her from beneath the weeping willow and her father gathers her in his arms and then the tears start to come . ._ .  
  
Bonnie wakes with tears on her cheeks and an inexplicable emptiness in her chest. She shifts and rubs her face against the unfamiliar scent of unfamiliar sheets. Soft, but not hers. Her legs are tangled in the covers, and it’s something of a struggle to free herself and thrown them all off.  
  
Sitting up, breathing heavy from exertion, the witch looks around the unfamiliar bedroom. Heavy furniture and dark curtains, and her mouth is dry and her throat is scratchy. Her head feels like she’s just done several major spells, and she flops back down to the bed as the last dregs of energy leave her.  
  
Bonnie feels like the walking dead.  
  
“Bonnie!” Caroline’s voice is chipper and perky, too chipper and too perky and it makes Bonnie want to curl into a ball and shove her head beneath the pillow. The room is dark thanks to the heavy curtains, but Caroline’s voice is like a bright ball of sunshine all on its own. “You’re awake!”  
  
She makes a non-committal grunting sound, all that she has the energy for and tries to follow her first instinct, that of burrowing back into the covers of the unfamiliar bed.  
  
“Bonnie?” There’s a change to Caroline’s voice, that unsure and watery waver that it gets when she thinks she’s about to be disappointed or something terrible might have just happened. “You are okay, right? Bonnie?”  
  
Swallowing a few times, Bonnie tries to work some moisture into her mouth and dry throat. She nods from her prone position and then flops her body over onto her side. Her head bobs in a faint nod of agreement. “I’m awake, Caroline.”  
  
She tries to focus on her blonde friend and fails utterly. Mostly because Caroline is moving at vampire speed and Bonnie goes from blinking at the blonde lurking in the doorway of the bedroom to blinking at the blonde standing at the side of the bed with a happy, relieved smile on her face. “Oh, thank God, we were so worried about you.”  
  
Caroline slides onto the side of the bed, her hands going for a cup with a straw on the bedside table. “Can you sit up? Do you need any help? Here’s some water.” The straw is tilted toward Bonnie and the cup held by Caroline. “You’re probably exhausted. I remember back when I had that horrible flu freshman year. Do you remember that? You and Elena -” Caroline stops, her voice hitches and she plows onward in typical Caroline full-steam-ahead fashion, “ - came over to watch television and play games with me after the fever broke and I was useless. All I could do was lay on the couch and listen to you guys talk and remember? You had to move my little iron around the Monopoly board -”  
  
Bonnie opens her mouth several times in an attempt to get a word in edgewise as she pushes to a sitting position. She's aided by Caroline who manages to reach around her and arrange pillows and tuck in covers and never spill a drop of water out of the cup. Bonnie takes it and sips the lukewarm water - pleasantly good which just goes to show how dry and dehydrated her body must be - in order to make sure she doesn’t end up wearing it. Caroline continues with the pillows and the prattle until Bonnie finally is able to speak over the young vampire’s voice.  
  
“Caroline.” Bonnie’s interjection is firm, but gentle.  
  
The blonde vampire stops, looks at Bonnie and then laughs lightly. “I’m overwhelming you, aren’t I?”  
  
“Just a little.” Bonnie takes another sip from the water and lowers the cup. “I got sick, didn’t I?”  
  
There’s a slow wobble of Caroline’s head up and down. “You did. Really sick. And we were worried. But you’re better now.” Caroline breathes in and out and it’s one of those things that Bonnie still has to get used to, watching the rise and fall of shoulders and chest with the intake of air that the other young woman doesn’t really need. “Do you think you can eat something? Do you want to eat something? I can make you some soup or maybe some crackers? Soup and crackers? Or - oh! A shower! Well, you can wash in the sink, there’s no hot water unless you want a cold shower -”  
  
“Caroline.” Louder and firmer this time. Bonnie waves the empty cup at her friend. She’d complain about being sick and having to be cared for, but she can already feel herself drifting and figures the complaining will have to wait until later. Then she can find out where she is, and how Jeremy and Elena are doing, and Sheriff Forbes too, though she must be doing better if Caroline is here . . .  
  
A sharp, quick shake of her head is given and Bonnie winces as pain lances through the skull. Her hands go to her temples and she gives a soft, “Ow.”  
  
“Are you okay? What’s wrong? What can I do to -”  
  
“I think I just need some more sleep,” Bonnie says. She’s already slumping back down against her pillows, eyes fluttering closed. “Remember you fell asleep before we finished playing Monopoly. . .”  
  
“I remember.” There’s a hitch to Caroline’s voice again and infinite sadness only Bonnie’s too tired to process it and decides she’ll ask about it later when she can stay awake a bit longer.  
  
The unfamiliar pillows are so very soft.  
  
\---  
  
Bonne drifts in and out of awareness for . . . she doesn’t know how long. The curtains are always drawn when she awakens, though she usually can’t take much more than a few breaths and roll around on the bed before Caroline is there with whatever she needs. Or whatever Caroline thinks she needs: soup, crackers, water, warm ginger ale. Sometimes she thinks she wakes to a pair of niggling familiar pale blue eyes watching over her, or Alaric’s concerned/relieved face, but what she remembers most is Caroline. Caroline’s soft singing, Caroline’s babble and prattle, Caroline attempting to care for her in the ways that no one has since Grams died.  
  
One day - one night - Bonnie doesn’t know for time due to the heavy curtains and the silence outside and all around - she comes out of it completely. Blinks her eyes open, sits up and reaches for the cup of water - graced today with a purple swirly straw - that’s always on the night table and within reach of her hands.  
  
Sipping, Bonnie looks around. She’s still tired and drained, and suspects she might be for a few days more, but she’s alert. Alert enough to allow her gaze to move around the bedroom that isn’t hers. It isn’t Caroline’s either or any of the bedrooms in Elena’s home. She thinks it might be a bedroom at the Lockwood mansion or even the boarding house, but that makes no sense to her so she simply shelves it until she can ask.  
  
The furniture is old, heavy wood and dark woods. Teak and cherry with form and shape that speaks of being carved in the past, not in the sixties or the fifties, or even the forties. This is old stuff, the sort of stuff that is a true antique going back before the days of the Antebellum south. There are old books on the bookcase and scattered over desktops and spilling over the shelves. There’s enough of a crack in the curtains for her to make out that much, the sharp slant of golden yellow spilling across the floor and providing a bit of illumination.  
  
Breathing a sigh, Bonnie returns the empty water cup to the nightstand and throws back the covers. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed drains her small spurt of energy, though she continues looking around even as she wrinkles her nose.  
  
“I stink,” Bonnie mutters. The dark t-shirt isn’t familiar and the bedsheets have that cloying smell of sickness to them. She vaguely has the impression of Caroline promising clean sheets and clothing as soon as Bonnie was well enough to get out of bed, but it’s a fragmented memory that slips through her fingers like sand.  
  
“You’ve been sick and sleeping for days,” Caroline chirps as she crosses the threshold.  
  
The sudden appearance of her friend causes Bonnie’s head to jerk up in surprise and a yelp escapes her before she can stop it. “Caroline! Don’t do that!”  
  
The blonde vampire gives her a sheepish smile, “Sorry. You’ve been a little out of it, so the coming and going didn’t phase you so much. I’ll make more noise.” She holds up two fingers, “I swear.”  
  
“Thank you. I’m pretty sure that in my condition I’m ripe for fainting,” Bonnie says, but the words are light and teasing. “What -”  
  
The words are cut off as she’s suddenly enveloped in the arms of her best friend, and the pair goes toppling over on the bed. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”  
  
Bonnie gives a gasp of air, a cross between laughter and simply having the wind knocked out of her, and Caroline rolls over, sits up and begins apologizing profusely. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you! It’s just that you were so sick and I was so worried -”  
  
“It’s okay, Caroline.” Bonnie catches her breath and takes her friend’s hands in her own. “Just tell me what’s been happening. Where am I? How are Elena and Jeremy? How’s your mother? How long was I sick? Have they found treatment yet -”  
  
Caroline takes a breath, and her smile wavers. “Bonnie -”  
  
“Needs to eat.” Alaric’s voice interrupts from the doorway. He holds up a bed tray, and he’s barely a foot into the room before the smell of chicken noodle soup wafts to Bonnie’s nose and she’s salivating. “It’s just soup, but you’ll need to start small.”  
  
The less than subtle look exchanged by the history teacher turned vampire hunter and cheerleader turned vampire isn’t unnoticed by Bonnie. It’s simply that she’s far hungrier than she thought she was and she’s looking at the tray with soup - and a smattering of crackers - like a starving vampire looks at an open wound.  
  
“Go slow,” Alaric cautions as Caroline busies herself helping Bonnie adjust the pillows and prop herself up in bed to eat. “Small spoonfuls until you’re sure you’re going to keep it all down.”  
  
Bonnie nods, and accepts the tray and the pampering with good humor. She intends to ask questions while eating, because apparently Caroline and Alaric plan to stay and watch her eat, though she’s getting the feeling that Caroline is watching her eat, and Alaric is watching Caroline and it’s a scenario that makes no sense to Bonnie’s way of thinking, but in the end the soup is more important and she finishes half the bowl and two crackers before she comes up for air.  
  
“Healthy appetite,” Alaric notes as he takes the tray away. “That’s a good sign.”  
  
Bonnie snags a last cracker before the tray disappears completely. Though apparently that’s not needed since Alaric only places it on a nearby table and then busies himself looking around the room. “Ok. So, tell me what’s going on. Where is everyone - where am I?”  
  
“The boarding house,” Caroline chirps as though Bonnie waking up in the boarding house is the most natural thing in the world.  
  
“I’m at Stefan and Damon’s?” Bonnie asks, her gaze darting around the room anew.  
  
“Mm-huh,” Caroline bobs her head up and down, and sits at the foot of the bed with her legs folded. “The hospitals were just ... I mean, you couldn’t take people there and -”  
  
“You’re sleeping in Stefan’s bed and wearing my shirt.”  
  
Bonnie’s head swivels to see Damon leaning in the doorway, that far too familiar shit-eating smirk on his face.  
  
She looks down at the shirt, up at Caroline to Damon and back to Caroline again, who nods.  
  
Pulling a face, Bonnie tugs at the shirt collar. “Ew.”  
  
“You’re welcome, Witchy,” Damon drawls. “But the alternative was to have you sleeping naked and we thought Ric might get some naughty ideas about his students.”  
  
Just like that, the vampire is gone as quick as a blink.  
  
Bonnie stares at the space where Damon was for a heartbeat. Then her head swivels back to Caroline. “What the hell is going on?”  
  



	3. nothing gold can stay

_No one so young should carry so much weight on their shoulders,_ Ric thinks.

Standing at a respectful distance, Ric watches Bonnie kneel on the patch of grass between the two freshly dug graves. Her head is a bowed and one hand rests on each mound, scattered with wild flowers because braving the streets of downtown on the hopes of finding live flowers in a florist couldn’t be risked. Her slight shoulders wobble and shake, and if he strains his ears enough, Ric can hear the soft sobs rising up from the young girl.

He’s torn between going to her, offering support and sympathy or just letting her grieve and come to terms with it in her own way. Ric doesn’t know Bonnie any better than he does Caroline, and everything he does know has come through their common struggles with and against the supernatural that inhabits their world. His link to Elena was much more tangible, even as tenuous as that was - connected through the threads of the two women he loved.

What links him now to Bonnie and Caroline is that they’ve all lost the same people in Elena and Jeremy, whom Ric tried hard to find a way for whom to be some sort of support. He thinks that he failed and did it quite miserably, not lifting his head beyond his self-pity and the bottle of alcohol until they both fell ill.

He knows that he would have crawled right back into that bottle after they died, if there had been time. If Bonnie hadn’t fallen ill, and Caroline hadn’t worried, and Bonnie hadn’t gotten _better_ instead of worse. If Damon hadn’t hovered, watching him like he thought Ric would be the next thing to slip away.

Ric tries not to wonder why he never fell sick, and why he is still standing when so many more useful and productive have fallen. When he does, he looks at Damon, who seems to be only as connected to the world as it is to him, and right now, that connection comes from the last remnants of Mystic Falls. He considers Caroline, when his faith falters, who might be a predator and a killer, but is _still_ Caroline, the cheerleader, the peppy one, the girl without a mother who is struggling to find her way. Now, too, he sees Bonnie, the one who tried to be strong, who made tough choices and was willing to give up everything for her best friend who now lies beneath the ground anyway.

He’s still here for a reason, and Ric thinks that the patchwork rag tag team that they make are his reason and his tether.

The lift of Bonnie’s head and her glance back over her shoulder in his direction interrupt his thoughts. Ric casts the maudlin aside and makes his way over to the younger woman - a still learning witch, his former student, and mostly a little girl as lost as the rest of them are. Laying a hand gently on his shoulder, he offers silent sympathy and support.

Bonnie reaches up to touch his hand, and he likes to think that she is taking something from that touch. From his presence. “Are you sure that they were both -”

“Yes.” Ric doesn’t allow her to complete the question. He still has far too many nightmares and sleepless nights where he watches Elena and Jeremy rise from their homemade burial shrouds, empty eyes and clawed fingers reaching for him. That is one thing that Ric has never doubted or second-guessed in those initial days of madness and societal collapse. “We were sure, Bonnie. Damon and I made sure.”

The witch nods, and slowly makes the rise to her feet, easily accepting Ric’s outstretched hand for assistance. She smooths her palms down the front of her black dress she’d insisted on wearing. It wasn’t a funeral, or even a memorial, but Bonnie wanted to say goodbye properly. Even Damon, who’d given her several once overs with an unreadable look on his face and careful neutrality in his eyes, hadn’t hassled her about the decision.

“But not everyone . . .” Bonnie trails off, her gaze slip-sliding around the empty cemetery. Ric mimics her, if only because he is constantly on guard these days unless they are safely ensconced in the boarding house. The dead walk everywhere these days, but oddly they don’t come to the one place where they would be most welcome, and where they should be.

“No, not everyone turned into a zombie,” Ric finishes for her. “Some people died and stayed that way.” He wonders if they were the lucky ones, if their souls are at rest, or if even the souls of those who sat up again are restful. Ric isn’t much of a religious man, but the days spent in and out of Baptist church and Bible school some days come back to taunt him.

Bonnie pushes her hair over her shoulder and purses her lips. She falls into step with Ric as they head toward the car. “Sometimes I wish that -”

“No, you don’t.” Ric stops and looks down at her. Again, he knows what she was going to say because he’s been there before. Those thoughts aren’t alien. “That’s called survivor’s guilt, Bonnie. I’ve had my fair share of it, but you can’t think that way. I don’t get into all that comforting religious stuff, but I have to think that maybe there’s a reason we’re the ones left. I don’t know what it is. But maybe we’ll figure it out someday.”

For a long moment, Ric thinks she will challenge him or argue the point. Instead, her shoulders slump with a sigh, her green eyes heavy with sadness and resignation.

 _Her eyes are old._ It’s something that Ric used to hear the old folks say when he was growing up and he never understood what it meant until recently. When he came here, these kids were _kids,_ they went to football games and hung out at the Grill and snuck off to have secret keg parties in the woods. Within months they were still wearing the bodies of teenagers, but they had all aged. They all had old eyes.

“It’s weird.” Bonnie cants her head and toys with the necklace she wears. “I was taking care of them. I fell asleep and when I woke up the whole world had changed.” She sighs and frowns. “Ended. It ended. And it had nothing to do with vampires or hybrids.” There’s a pause as a breeze blows, whispering through the grass and carrying the remnants of the old world - a page of newspaper, a leaflet, the petals of dead flowers - across the ground.

Bonnie half-kneels, half-leans over and picks up the leaflet. It’s religious scripture calling on people to repent because the time of judgement is near. “Seems weird to imagine it happening . . . almost overnight.”

Ric almost argues but then changes his mind. He peeks at the leaflet. “Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Seems fitting.” He continues walking, leading the way to the car. Every now and again, he looks back around them, constantly alert for an incoming, shuffling zombie. “It did happen fast. At first the sickness moved slow. People would be sick for days. Feverish, and then they’d hemorrhage out . . .” Stopping, Ric clears his throat and realizes that she probably doesn’t want the details. She can read them in the newspapers, what there were of them before the presses stopped.

“It started happening a lot faster as the sickness mutated. People lived two, maybe three days. Near the end, when the hospitals were shut down . . . it was maybe a day.” That was when soldiers roamed the streets, sick and dying themselves, shooting anything that moved, because the dead weren’t staying dead. When the news reports started telling people to stay inside until the madness died down, when martial law became synonymous with shoot-on-sight and chaos. “It took those left a while to figure out that the dead weren’t just walking, but that they were infectious too. By then, it was too late.”

“It must have been horrible.” Bonnie shivers and Ric suspects that it has little to do with the light summer breeze.

“It wasn’t a picnic,” Ric tosses the words out jovially, hoping to bring some lightness to the conversation. “That was how we know that you weren’t sick like everyone else, though. Days passed and you didn’t get worse. You didn’t get better, but you didn’t get worse. Then Caroline said that you _smelled_ different. Not as sick.” It was one of those moments that reminded Ric that just because Caroline looks like a bubbly blonde cheerleader, she’s a vampire beneath it all. “That’s when we moved you to the boarding house.”

“And put me in Stefan’s bed?” Bonnie lifts a brow, and for the first time since arriving, there’s a touch of humor in her eyes.

“Would you have rather woken up in Damon’s bed?” Ric teases.

Bonnie shudders and pulls a face. “No.”

“You really don’t like him.” It’s not a question as much as it is a statement. Ric knows there’s history between the witch and the vampire, an established relationship that was forged before he came onto the scene. Off her look, Ric holds up his hands, “I’m not judging. Damon is . . . difficult to like on a good day, never mind his bad days.” God knows the vampire has _a lot_ of bad days.

“I know he’s your friend, Alaric.” Bonnie stops, worries her lip and seems to think about her words. “I don’t know _how_ I feel about Damon. I don’t actively hate him anymore because at least when it came to Elena he could be human. But he’s been such a loose canon and hurt so many people . . .”

“It’s hard to see the good in him.”

Bonnie pushes her bangs back from her forehead. “That’s just it. It’s not, not anymore. The problem is, he embraces the part that isn’t good. I know that we’re all in this together now, and he’ll watch my back if only because he thinks it’s what Elena would have wanted.” She sighs as they reach Ric’s SUV and he holds the door open for her. “But I can’t forget the things he’s done. Or what he is. He’s not Caroline. She struggles. Damon just goes with it.”

Ric can’t argue with the witch’s assessment. He holds the door open a moment after she’s climbed inside, waiting until she turns those too old eyes to him again. “Good for you. Stick with that. I think I give him a free pass too easily sometimes. If we’re all going to do this thing together, Damon needs someone calling him on his shit.” He closes the door and crosses to the driver’s side. “Call me on my shit too if I go to easy on him.”

“I’m good at calling shit.”

The vampire-hunter turned teacher turned not-quite-mentor laughs at her frankness. “Yes, Bonnie. I think that you are.”


	4. one traveler, long i stood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which plans are made to look for survivors, and Damon is an ass.

“We have to look for survivors.” Bonnie jumps off the island counter of the kitchen, tossing out her pronouncement as though it’s the most logical course of action _ever_ and all others be damned. Damon supposes that somewhere in that little witchy-seventeen-year-old brain of hers it really is, but that doesn’t make it _right._

The vampire responds the only way he knows how. With sarcasm and a look that he hopes is as scathing as he’s trying to make it. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” Bonnie looks at him. Her eyes are hard and already tilting toward annoyed, which is pretty standard operating procedure when she looks at him. “ _Seriously._ ”

“No,” Damon speaks slowly, as if talking to a very small and very dimwitted young child. “What we have to do is decide where we’re going next. Downtown Mystic Falls, is _not_ on the list of summertime vacation destinations.”

“We can’t leave if there is even the possibility of there being anyone else alive here. We _have_ to look.”

Damon peers at her, pulls a face and rolls his eyes. He’s in her space in the blinking of an eye, but Bonnie being _Bonnie_ doesn’t bat an eye and doesn’t even take a step back. Her green eyes flash defiantly up toward him, daring him to come even closer and challenging him to make his point. _Who do you think they’re going to listen to?_ Bonnie’s unwavering gaze seems to say. _You? Or me?_

Because at the end of the day, they both know that Bonnie’s bleeding heart and do-good attitude is going to have Caroline backing her up in a heartbeat and Alaric trying to smooth things over.

“What part of _flesh eating zombies_ did you fail to understand?” It doesn’t stop Damon from saying the words or spelling out his point. “We’re only safe here because we’re not noisy and they haven’t picked up the trail of yummy witch and history teacher eats. You are just _begging_ for trouble by waltzing into town unready and unarmed -”

“Then I’ll be ready. And I’ll be armed.”

“You’ll be _dead._ ”

“Not as long as I can still do _this._ ” She’s barely completed the last word before she’s flicking her fingers and Damon feels the ground leave his feet. Or rather it’s his feet leaving the ground as he sails backwards across the kitchen and slams into the refrigerator. It’s not hard enough to injure him, but it knocks the wind out of him and snaps his back against the stainless steel with a loud, reverberating thunk. He waits to hit the ground, and when that isn’t happening, he’s peering at her with a great deal of annoyance - and a smidgen of respect for her abilities that he’ll _never_ admit to aloud - as Bonnie holds him pinned with her magic.

“Impressive,” Ric says, and even though he’s trying hard to hide it, Damon can hear the amusement in his voice.

Caroline makes no attempt to hide it, loosing a loud giggle.

“Only when there’s one of them,” Damon points out. “What if there’s more than one? What if you’re surrounded?” He can maintain his dignity and make his point even when being held up against an expensive and underused appliance by invisible threads. “Put me down.”

Bonnie cocks her head and opens her mouth, but Ric cuts her off at the pass. “Bonnie, let go of Damon, please. Gently.” The other man turns his attention to Damon and gives him what Damon likes to privately call his ‘warning chaperone face.’ Given that Ric _really_ sucks as a chaperone, it’s neither that daunting or that impressive. “Damon don’t bait Bonnie. Let’s all just talk about this - _rationally -_ for a few minutes.”

Damon strongly suspects that the emphasis on the _rationally_ part was aimed specifically in his direction. The invisible tethers vanish instantly, and Damon drops, only catching himself before face planting on the floor by the sheer grace of his vampire reflexes.

“What’s there to talk about? Did you look for survivors?” Bonnie turns from Damon to Ric, and as quick as that the most dangerous person in the room is forgotten about and relegated to the importance level of Vampire Barbie. Damon glares, because he hates being ignored and he _hates_ being dismissed even more than he hates being ignored, and he hates that Bonnie is so full of herself and her power that she doesn’t even flinch or give off the little hints of fear she once did when dealing with him.

He takes a step forward, and Caroline is in his path as subtlety as Caroline can be subtle. A shoulder and a leg, a quick glance over her shoulder as though daring him to push through her - as though Damon wouldn’t if he had a reason to do so. But really, Caroline is too easy and Ric would frown and it would hardly be a point to having a hand in nursing Bonnie back to health if he just went ahead and drained her.

Besides, they might end up needing that witch’s brew later.

Ric sighs, exchanges a glance with Caroline and frowns at Damon who just leans back against the refrigerator and smirks with his arms folded across his chest. “No, we didn’t.”

“It was getting dangerous out there,” Caroline steps up, hugging herself around her midsection. “We brought you here because you weren’t as sick as everyone else and by then -”

“It was _Dawn of the Dead_ ,” Damon interjects, earning a glare from Caroline and another one of those supposedly warning looks from Ric. “Not a good time to go door-to-door checking for crazies with shotguns hiding in their front closets.”

“Bonnie.” Ric draws the witch’s attention before she can throw a spell at Damon just because she _can_ throw a spell at Damon. “Everything happened fast. People started dying, and then . . . not all of them stayed dead.” A shadow flickers across Ric’s face and he swallows hard. His gaze slides somewhere past Bonnie, to a nondescript spot on the wall, and then slowly returns. Damon can see the memories and the weight in his friend’s eyes and it makes him shift uncomfortably, avoiding Ric’s eyes - and Caroline’s - as he pretends that the ceiling tiles are of great interest.

“Not everyone got sick like you, and you know I didn’t get sick at all. A lot of people were bitten by _those things._. . and they turned into them. We just wanted to hole up and be safe.”

“But you just said it yourself. Not everyone got sick. And I got better. There could be other people out there who survived and don’t know what’s going on. People who didn’t have friends to take care of them, and wake up to and explain things -”

“Who might have gotten chomped on by the living dead while they were mostly comatose,” Damon feels the need to interject. “Who’d turn down a free and easy meal?”

“Not you,” Caroline rolls her eyes and snorts.

“All that bagged blood? Not going to last forever, Blondie.” Damon pushes away from the refrigerator and joins the trio gathered around the kitchen island of the Salvatore Boarding House kitchen. It’s eerily lit with candles and lanterns and one LED lamp despite the fact that the sun is reaching its zenith in the sky, and it’s not quite noon yet. The boarded windows stop all but a few jagged blades of light from beaming inside.

Leaning against the counter, Damon shoots Caroline a look. “You might want to think about not being so judgemental and picky in the future.”

“Damon.” The warning comes from Ric, a dark glare accompanies the gasp from Bonnie, and it’s Caroline who's the last to _get it_.

“Eww. Just .. eww! Why don’t you just eat a zombie?"

Damon laughs and it's both amused and harsh. “I wasn’t talking about corpses or zombies -”

“Just don’t!” Bonnie holds up a hand. Her green eyes flash in the dim light as she gapes at him. “Do you even listen to yourself sometimes?” Beat. “No. Don’t.” Her shoulders roll back as she takes a visible breath and breathes it out, purposefully turning away from Damon as much as she can. “How many people do we know, that we don’t know are dead? Just think about it.”

“Matt,” Caroline pipes up. Her voice wavers a bit. “He was ... sick. I was taking care of him and my mother and . . I went back and he wasn’t there. But ... his neighbor had said she was going to drive to the hospital and would take Matt too even though the hospitals weren’t taking anybody. I tried to check the hospital after my Mom -” There’s a pause and a swallow and though he won’t admit it aloud, even Damon feels that tugging pang of _loss_ because he has few friends, and Liz was one he counted among them.

_At least she didn’t change._

At the end, so many did.

“The hospital was dangerous. There were soldiers and they were checking people and I couldn’t stay,” Caroline finishes sadly.

“Then Matt might be alive.” Bonnie straightens, a soft smile on her face. “There. That’s one.”

Damon snorts derisively. “That’s wishful thinking.”

“It’s _human_ thinking, Damon,” Ric says and there’s no warning, no sharpness to the tone. It’s gentle and sympathetic and _tired_ and Damon wonders when Ric became so tired because now isn’t a good time. The end of the world is here, and they can’t afford to be tired if they want to survive. Really, Damon _wants_ to survive because almost dying permanently has shown him that no matter how bad the shit is - and between having to shoot friends and bury their bodies, and having a brother who is still tearing a swatch of bloody murder and dismembered corpses along the coastline the shit _is bad_ \- he’s not ready to throw in the towel yet.

"Tyler went missing," Caroline adds. "It all happened around the full moon and with everyone being sick . . . " There's a flash of guilt across Caroline's face, her gaze turning toward the floor.

"That's two," Bonnie says gently, reaching out a hand to touch Sob Story Vampire Barbie''s hand. "You didn't do anything wrong, Caroline. From what you've told me, there was a lot going on."

“But there isn't now. It's calmer. We should look.” Caroline agrees and she turns to Damon with that determined look on her face that she saves for ordering around cheerleaders - none of those left - and being her neurotic, control freak of self. “It can’t hurt to look.”

“It can’t hurt _you_ ,” Damon points out. “I see two people here who can become zombie chow and I’m guessing that’s not a fun way to go.” Also, Damon did not sign up to watch any more people he knows become shambling card carrying members of the living dead club.

He knows though from the look of resignation and guilt on Ric’s face and the set of Caroline’s shoulders and the wrinkle of consternation across Bonnie’s brow that he’s already lost this argument. Damon wonders briefly why he didn’t just get the hell out of Dodge when the shit hit the fan, after Liz, after Elena, after Andie -

“Safety in numbers. We’ll stick together. We’ll do this organized, periodic sweeps,” Ric says in acquiescence.

 _That’s why,_ a niggling little part of Damon’s conscious says as he watches the group put their heads together to plan. He came to this town to tear it down, and he seems to be clinging to the only parts of it left that might mean anything at all.

 

###

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the shortness of this chapter. The next one will be better.
> 
> It should be noted by now that I'm long-winded and on the wordy side. Thank you to everyone who is still patiently reading and following along in spite of this.


	5. no bird was singing in it now, a single leaf was on the bough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damon never realized quite how much noise humans could keep up until they aren’t keeping it up anymore. There’s no music in the background, no voices carrying through the air, no lilting laughter or charged shouts. The familiar scents of soap and food and perfume and life are missing now, and all his senses detect is the grass and trees, dogs and cats, and the lingering, acrid stench of sickness, death and decay.

The suburban hamlets and idyllic neighborhoods of Mystic Falls resemble nothing more than the streets of a deserted ghost town. It’s not the picturesque warmth that the greeting cards and travel brochures show. It’s an emptiness, a quiet deadness that is eerie in its completeness. Dark windows stare like empty sockets down on a road littered with debris: clothing, overturned bicycles, a broken fence gate hangs half-off its hinges squeaking in the barely there breeze of a mid-summer in July. Cars stand abandoned in driveways, in garages, open doors and now dead interior lights in the middle of the silent streets. Newspapers crackle and whisper as the wind scampers them across pavement and grass, and a squirrel pauses at the foot of a tree, twitching ears before darting up the side and disappearing into the branches.

Damon never realized quite how much noise humans could keep up until they aren’t keeping it up anymore. There’s no music in the background, no voices carrying through the air, no lilting laughter or charged shouts. The familiar scents of soap and food and perfume and _life_ are missing now, and all his senses detect is the grass and trees, dogs and cats, and the lingering, acrid stench of sickness, death and decay.

“This isn’t right,” Bonnie whispers and her whisper is as loud as a shout to Damon’s ears in the still silence. He can hear her swallow, the slow breaths she takes to keep herself calm.

“No,” Caroline agrees, wrapping an arm around Bonnie’s waist. “It isn’t.”

It’s not the time nor the place to make some quip about girl-on-girl love as he divides his attention between watching the streets and watching his companions, so he doesn’t. He hefts the pick axe that he carries in one hand, gaze sliding to Ric and his crossbow. Damon can hear the shambling dead walkers but they’re a good distance away and nothing to fret over.

They pass a car, run up onto the curb and into a tree. The hood is bent into a upward peak in the middle, the front end has a nice tree shaped dent. The airbag is deployed, and something dark and thick trails from the car and down the road, stopping at a well made Italian leather loafer.

There’s a faint sound from the witch, and Damon comes to a halt, fanning to the side as the two girls stop. Peripherally he watches Bonnie bend to pick up a bedraggled doll, watches her straighten the dirtied dress before upending the overturned wagon it must have fallen out of. She places the doll neatly, without a word.

“Bonnie -” Caroline begins.

“I’m good.” Bonnie’s reply is sharp, tight. Damon can hear the horror in her throat, the things that she’s holding back and not saying. He’s almost impressed, except that she’s not new to death and horror, though this goes far beyond anything that any of his companions has ever dealt with, and he hopes that the witch is a lightweight because the dent that Ric and Caroline put into his alcohol stash in the immediate aftermath was quite large.

“Matt’s house is right up here,” Bonnie holds her head up high, and pushes forward. Eyes straight ahead as though to block out what she’s seeing because she’s seen enough.

 _And you haven’t seen anything at all,_ Damon thinks.

There’s movement off to the side shadows, and Damon and Caroline exchange a glance, stilling at the same time. Damon places a hand on Ric’s arm, Caroline pushes Bonnie behind her and - another beat later, both vampires relax. Damon can hear and feel Caroline’s sigh of relief, and he rolls his eyes.

The mutt of a dog, with a matted, muddied coat wanders from between houses. It’s been eating well. The stink of garbage and decomposition cling to it and Caroline wrinkles her nose prettily in disgust. “We don’t have any food. Shoo!” Not too loudly, because while they have suspicions that the walkers navigate by sound like hungry, blind brain dead bats, they haven’t tested it and have no intentions of doing such.

They piled into the streets from all directions when Ric fired a shot gun, and they’re not too long off when cars are involved, hence the reason they’re all on foot.

The dog sniffs the ground and wanders closer.

Damon growls, because the last thing they need is rabies or a tag-along mutt following around behind them.

The mongrel whimpers, backs up, tucks tail between its legs and darts across the street.

Bonnie gives him a look. “It was a _dog_ , Damon.”

“It’s been eating dead bodies, Bonnie.”

She blanches, and Damon smirks. He’ll take the little victories where he can get them. Though the next moment he’s frowning at Ric who’s just slapped him up along the back of his head.

The Donovan house is empty and has been for days. Damon senses it the moment they step onto the porch. Empty houses have a certain feel to them, and this house radiates it the same as all the others in the neighbor. The smell of death is here too, the windows busted out are not a good sign.

The door is unlocked when Caroline tries the knob. She pushes it open, peering inside, and calling softly, “Matt? Matt? It’s me. Caroline. And Bonnie. . . and Ric, I mean, Mr. Saltzman and -”

“Really?” Damon interrupts. He pushes past Caroline and then just stops. Hands placed against the invisible barrier before him as though he’s a sidewalk mime.

“Damon, quit goofing around,” Ric chastises.

“I’m not,” Damon tells him and once again really, really hates the metaphysical rule that requires vampires to have an invitation. There’s no way that Caroline and Bonnie won’t stop looking for Caroline’s Ken Doll until he’s found - or until Damon can actually get inside the house.

“You can’t get in!” Caroline jumps up and claps her hands. Damon steps back just in case her overwhelming happiness leads her to do something like _hug_ him. “Yes! You can’t get in!”

Blondie, of course, can get in because she’s been invited and she’s across the threshold and calling out for Matt again with renewed enthusiasm. Bonnie follows with a backwards glance over her shoulder, and Damon swears she’s smirking at him.

“You want to stay here and watch the door?” Ric asks as steps inside.

“Yeah, why don’t I do that.” Damon leans against the invisible barrier as though it’s a wall, and from the look Ric gives him, he knows it’s just _a little_ disconcerting. Good. He listens as the girls move through the house, opening doors, checking in closets. Damon could have told them that the boy _isn’t_ there, but Caroline won’t be happy until she turns the place inside out and they’ve nothing but time on this wild goose chase.

Which isn’t quite so wild anymore because now they have to find Matt. Who could be bleeding out and dying somewhere, with zombies feasting on his entrails but that’s probably not a suggestion that the merry rescue brigand wants hear.

“He’s not here,” Caroline announces as she comes down the stairs and to the doorway with Bonnie on her heels. “But I know where he could be.”

“The Grill,” Bonnie supplies.

“You want to go to the Grill?” Damon’s gaze flickers between the pair of them, but it lingers on Caroline. “You have got to be kidding me.”

 

###

 

“I don’t like this.” Their small group is standing at the main intersection leading to downtown Mystic Falls, leaning and crouched against the wall of the corner brick building. It’s past midday and the sun is past its apex and winding its way toward the evening, though it will be some time before it sets. It is the height of summer where daylight is greater than nightlight, though that doesn’t matter to walker zombies.

Caroline shakes her head, cheerleader ponytail bobbing and bouncing as she does. “I don’t like this,” Vampire Barbie repeats.

Damon scans up one side of the street, down the other and across the square. “I assume that you like it better when the streets are crawling with zombies?”

“No.” Caroline scowls at him and Damon can’t help but smirk a bit. Seems that Caroline’s natural way of looking at him is _always_ a scowl of some sort. “I just don’t like it when it’s quiet like this. It’s _too_ quiet.”

“I’m going to call it a blessing.” Damon steps away from the wall and takes another look down the four streets. “We shouldn’t have a problem getting to the Grill, anyway.”

"But?"

Damon was waiting for the prompt and he didn't doubt for a minute that Ric would oblige him.

"Getting into the Grill might be a problem." Their traveling band of merry makers aren't the first who had this idea. That's his assumption from the scene in front of the Grill. A three car pile up, two doors ajar, one body half out of the car but not quickly enough by what's left of the attempted escapee. "I don't think we're the first ones to see Shaun of the Dead. If anyone's in there, if they're smart, they're going to have it locked up tight."

"Breaking and entering is going to be noisy," Ric says. Damon won't ever admit it aloud, but he likes that the school teacher isn't stupid and can follow his train of thought so easily. Then again, maybe he will share it out aloud because he's pretty sure Ric would be unsettled for days to know that he's able to think like a raging sociopath.

"I can unlock it," Bonnie volunteers. She looks between her compatriots and there's a firmness in her voice that suggests that maybe, just maybe, the witch has gotten some footing despite the grimness of the surroundings which don't sing cheery songs of days gone by. She wiggles her fingers, gives a faint smile that while not touching her eyes does spark with a hint of smugness. "Witch, remember?"

"Can you unbarricade it?" Damon tosses right back because it's something to do, and hell if he's going to let anyone other than himself be the smug one under these circumstances. Besides which, cockiness gets people killed and he's still thinking that in the coming days they're going to need Bonnie's witchy-juju.

"What?" Bonnie scrunches her face, frowning at him. Confusion is writ all over her face and Damon childishly marks a point in the column labeled 'Salvatore.'

"I think what Damon is saying is that if someone holed up in the Grill as a place of safety, they might have had the presence of mind to barricade themselves in." Ric comes through as the voice of reason again, explaining the things that Damon intentionally didn't say. It's familiar and annoying in its familiarity. "That's what I would do."

"Not like we have to worry about _that,_ " Caroline rolls her shoulders back. "Damon and I can handle getting inside if there are obstacles blocking the door."

"Maybe we should get there first?" Damon is tired of discussion. He's tired of roaming around and just waiting to be a buffet, solely on the off-chance that they'll find the Ken-doll to Caroline's Barbie.

Pushing away from the wall, Damon cants his head and listens to the silence of the town. There are zombies somewhere, but not close to them. Not yet. "After me. Stick together."

The last goes without saying, but Damon says it anyway.

The vampire moves out, setting off at a brisk human clip for the seemingly abandoned Grill. It's not as fast as he could move, or would like to move, but a calculated speed that Ric and Bonnie, running between he and Caroline, can keep up. They've been moving this way, in this sort of formation by some unspoken agreement. The two vampires sandwiching the humans, the first and last lines of defense.

They're moving fast, and mostly quietly, but to Damon's keen hearing they're loud. The patter-tap-slap of Bonnie's sneakers and Ric's work boots on the pavement echo like gun shots in Damon's ears. He imagines that the walking dead can hear them for miles around and wonders why humans have to be so loud.

First lesson? How to kill a zombie.

Second lesson? Stealth.

Slipping past abandoned cars, and skirting around an overturned shopping cart - never mind how that got out in the middle of the street - they reach the front doors of the Grill unscathed. The humans breathe heavily, another sound that fills the silence of the dead streets with the loudness of an elephant's trumpet.

"They're coming," Caroline says. The blonde vampire is taking a moment to demonstrate that she can be useful. She's taken up position about four feet from the doors, a large metal post in one hand. Later, Damon will wonder where she got the post and _if_ she even knows how to use it, but for now, it's not worth the baiting. He can hear what she hears. The low shuffle of dragging and limping feet, inhuman groans and grunts still distant but coming closer.

"Witchy, now would be a good time to open the door." Damon takes up position beside the door, trusting Caroline and Ric to watch the streets. He'll take care of anything that might come shambling out once Bonnie works her witchy magic.

Magic doesn't work the way it does in the movies. Damon's seen some spectacular displays and being thrown across a room by sheer force of will or watching a trapped vampire is nothing at which to sneeze, but in general there are no telltale signs beyond chanting when there's magic at play. It's no different now as Bonnie focuses her attention on the door. The witch fixes her gaze on the door for a moment, then holds up her hands over the lock. Her eyes flutter closed and her lips part, a soft chanting of latin words falling from them.

"We're not going to be alone for long." Caroline doesn't speak loudly, though she may as well shout against the deadness of the streets and Damon's over-sensitive hearing.

Damon turns and glances over one shoulder. Not toward Caroline, but rather in the direction he knows she's gazing. He can hear the dead-footed shuffle, and his finely honed vision narrows to the sight of a trio of zombies half-walking, half-stumbling in their direction.

"You might want to hurry it up, Bonnie. Looks like we're going to get some party crashers."

As if on cue, there is an audible pop and click. Waiting for Bonnie to make the announcement isn't an option, and at the sound, Damon edges the witch aside. A booted toe nudges the door open as his hand slowly pushes down the handle. The vampire grants her points for curbing her indignation and keeping silent as he takes a quick glance inside.

"Is there - " Caroline starts

"Quiet," Damon snaps. He's listening, and there, he can hear it. Breathing and a heartbeat. Far enough back that whomever it is it smart enough to stay away from the door. "Someone's in there."

He nudges the door a bit further and stops when it hits up against something solid. "Barricaded." Peering through the crack, Damon can see the piles of tables and chairs pushed against the door. With a quick glance around, gauging the distance of the zombies, Damon shoves up against the door hard with his shoulder.

"I have a gun! I'll use it," comes the voice from inside.

"Matt!" Caroline yells. The blonde draws her eyes from her post and runs to the door.

"Shut up!" Damon hisses.

"Caroline?" The voice comes again. This time with the pounding of feet and the jock's head and shoulder appear between an upturned barstool's legs.

"Might want to move the reunion inside?" Ric suggests, unshouldering his crossbow and aiming it toward the growing number of zombies. "Quickly?"


	6. whose woods these are i think i know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The inside of the Grill is, well Bonnie doesn't want to use the words 'untouched' or 'pristine' because they're not quite right and really don't fit. Yet somehow the Grill with its dark panels and heavy woods and pub-like atmosphere seems to be more undisturbed than the rest of the town.

The inside of the Grill is, well Bonnie doesn't want to use the words 'untouched' or 'pristine' because they're not quite right and really don't fit. Yet somehow the Grill with its dark panels and heavy woods and pub-like atmosphere seems to be more undisturbed than the rest of the town. If one ignores the overturned tables and stacked bar stools that were doing sentry duty guarding the door when they arrived. They did their job well, as evidenced by the fact that Matt couldn't get them cleared in time as the shambling dead approached and they're now haphazardly stacked against the sides of the room and the door again, this time by magic.

_"Matt, hurry!" Caroline yells. She's got her back to the door, a steel bar in one hand that she's using a baseball bat to swat away any undead that get too close. Stabbing isn't an option yet, not at this close distance. Not when the time it takes to dislodge her weapon might let two or three more close the gap._

_There's the whistling of a crossbow released from its string followed by the sucking thwaping of it finding home. Alaric is on guard, covering Caroline and Damon on the front lines while Bonnie pushes on the door crack to get a better view inside._

_"I'm trying!" In the depths of the Grill, Matt's voice is both apologetic and **scared**. _

_The crack is just wide enough to cause a line of summer sun to slice its way across the comparative darkness of the Grill. Matt's head bobs and turns, arms moving through the sliver of light as he works to tear down his barrier at a much more rapid rate than he put it up._

_"Matt, move!" Bonnie shoves hands and an arm through the crack, pushing it wider. There's a grunt from Damon over behind her left shoulder. A sickening wet, cracking twisting sound fills her ears and Bonnie forces herself to not look back._

_"Just a few more - " The jock misinterprets, shakes his head and keeps going. A table laden with bar stools tumbles down with a loud clattering and crash._

_"Matt. Move!" A bit louder this time, coming with more force and less questioning. Bonnie's words are strong and controlled, tight and sharp. Enough to cause Matt to lift his eyes, for that split second connection to be made as blue connects with brown. He's really not seen her power, but he's heard enough. In that moment he understands and he's scrabbling backwards from his tower fortress, disappearing into the shadows that Bonnie can't see beyond the door._

_With little time to waste, Bonnie closes her eyes and focuses. Reaching inside the Grill with her mind. The witch can feel the wood of the chair, the veneer of the tables. The carefully balanced stacking and placement. As a soft chant falls from her lips, the barrier wall begins to tremble. Tiny shudders at first that become more pronounced until the whole of it vibrates to a timbre of its own._

_Bonnie hears the sliding and scraping of the individual bits across the floor. She hears the barrier slamming into the walls inside the Grill, but doesn't register that the way is clear until Matt's yanking her inside with everyone tumbling in after._

The severed arm that Damon tore from a far too determined zombie still sits at the entrance.

"Why did we never think of raiding the Grill?" Alaric asks from his seat at the bar. An open bottle of scotch and two glasses sit between he and Damon. Not to be forgotten, an untouched glass sits before Bonnie and Matt and Caroline have a glass as well.

"I did," Damon snorts, picking up the bottle to top off his glass. " _You_ thought it was better not to linger, and that the boarding house was safer."

"It _was_ safer," Alaric argues. " _Is_ safer." He takes a swallow from his glass, lifts it in a half-toast toward Matt. "As safety goes, however, the Grill makes an excellent second choice. Not too many windows, plenty of stock, separate generator, secure basement and backroom - "

"And all the booze you can drink," Damon finishes. He lifts his glass in a toast of his own before tossing the amber liquid back.

Bonnie bites back a scathing word or two, choosing to roll her eyes at the juvenile display instead. Normally, she'd loose a quip or two about Damon's behavior, but controlling the vampire's drinking isn't something that's top priority at the moment. Things are quiet, and they're safe, if one ignores the groaning and scratching of fleshy hands at the door.

Bonnie does her best to ignore it.

"If I'd known you were here . . . " Caroline hasn't left Matt's side since they found him. The blonde vampire hovers, reaching out sometimes to touch his shoulder or his hand, as though afraid that he isn't real. Or that he might disappear if she doesn't ensure his solidity. Bonnie can hardly blame her for that feeling.

"It's okay, Care." Matt's boy next door smile is full of warmth and affection. He looks no better than the rest of them, strung along by the horror of the apocalypse - because there is no denying that this is exactly the world they're living in, a post-apocalyptic horror - but somehow still holding his wits together. "I never thought to check the boarding house. After I got well, I checked your house and Elena's. . ."

"Yours too, Bonnie." Matt's soft blue eyes lift from Caroline to focus on his other childhood friend and Bonnie can't help but smile a bit. It's just like Matt to want to make sure that she knows she's important, and that no one feels left out. "Even yours, Mr. Saltzman." He shrugs, though pink colors his cheeks and crawls into the shells of his ears. "I figured everyone was dead, and even if Elena or Jeremy were alive, then Damon probably packed them up and got them out of town."

"If I had thought it would do any good," is all Damon says. He doesn't need to say more. Everyone knows that when the world came crashing down, if he could have saved Elena from it, he would have moved heaven and earth to do so.

In unspoken agreement, the group lapses into silence for a moment. Respecting those lost, or maybe just because there's nothing left to say about that world that's been swept away.

"What happened to you?" Caroline finally ventures to ask. She finally takes a swallow from her glass. It's an absent sort of gesture, drinking because it's there.

"Tamara," Matt says. He looks around and grabs a chair from a nearby table. One of the few that hasn't been sacrificed to the barricades. "She's my neighbor's daughter. She came around to check on her mother, and found me instead. I didn''t even know how I go there. She found me on the porch. I don't remember a lot from when I got sick."

"I know Mrs. Riley who lived across the street was going to take me to the hospital with her husband, but we couldn't get in. It was too busy, I guess. I remember wanting to go back home, but she wanted to wait. Maybe I went home on my own." Matt furrows his brow, as though sheer force of will can bring back the lost and scattered memories. Bonnie knows that it will do little good. The days she lost in the haze of fever and sickness seem to be gone forever.

"Tamara said she thought I was as good as dead, but she brought me in and took care of me anyway. When I got better, I made Tamara go home with me. That was a mistake. Some of those things had gotten there first." This time Matt throws back the entire glass of bourbon. Without a word, Caroline plucks it from his fingers and takes it over to Damon, silently holding it out for a refill.

More surprisingly, Damon only quirks a brow before refilling the glass. "I believe the word you're looking for is zombies. Because our existence wouldn't be complete until we experienced everything the supernatural has to offer."

"I think you're just upset that with werewolves and zombies, you're not a special snowflake anymore," Alaric teases.

The timing is off. The mood is macabre. Somehow, though, it's what they need. The (former) history teacher's words might not bring guffaws, but there are a few smiles at the statement. Even Damon toasts Alaric for the words.

"Matt." Caroline sets a hand to his arm, looking up at him with gentle eyes. "Where's Tamara now?"

The jock's head drops and his face shutters briefly. "Gone, I guess." The sentence ends with a period, but hangs in the air as well. A tagged on 'like everyone else,' left unspoken in the stagnant air between them. "She went scavenging and to look for survivors. My leg - I couldn't go - "

Bonnie's gaze falls to Matt's bandaged knee and then flickers back to his face. "It's not your fault." She says in the same breath as Caroline, except that it's the blonde who wraps him in a hug, and it's Bonnie who wonders if this is going to become a litany for them for the rest of their days.

"You're coming back to the boarding house with us," Alaric declares. He empties his glass and reaches for the bottle. Why not? There are plenty more where that came from. "We'll scavenge what we can from here and go home."

No one argues with the designation. Mystic Falls, at least this part of it, with its empty houses and dead infested streets, isn't home anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the time stretch between posting this chapter and the last. Unfortunately, Real Life has a way of interfering. 
> 
> I know this chapter is the weakest one so far, and we don't get a lot of Matt's story. That may be a stand alone one-shot at a later date.


	7. between the woods and frozen lake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a wealth of knowledge and magic buried in those pages, things she hasn’t come close to even learning all of just yet. Even with a few more months time and if she had a brain like a sponge, Bonnie couldn’t learn half of what she’ll be leaving behind when they go.

Bonnie runs her fingers along the worn spines of the leather bound books. “We can’t just leave the grimoires.” There’s a wealth of knowledge and magic buried in those pages, things she hasn’t come close to even learning all of just yet. Even with a few more months time and if she had a brain like a sponge, Bonnie couldn’t learn half of what she’ll be leaving behind when they go.

“No.” Damon vetoes immediately. “Absolutely not. We have to pack real supplies. Things we need to survive.” He reaches for a grimoire, but off Bonnie’s look quickly retracts his hand. “You can’t eat books. Unless we need kindling, they’re useless.”

“We can’t just leave them here for anyone to find!” Bonnie protests. She wonders if Damon has even thought that far ahead. Leaving recipe books for spells and magic laying around would be both irresponsible and dangerous.

“Bonnie, I know the grimoires mean a lot to you, but Damon’s right.” Ric - because Bonnie’s taken to calling him that in her head, if not vocally these days because really when they’re all living together and surviving together, it seems silly to fall back on stringent routines - hefts one of the boxes and then returns it to its spot on the chair. “As much as I’m sure you could learn a lot from them, and we could use a lot of what you learn, these are heavy and we can’t take them with us.” He shoots a look at Damon, “Especially since we’re not one hundred percent certain where we’re going.”

Damon ignores the look, if he sees it at all. “Atlanta. We’ve been over this.”

“Assuming that the emergency broadcast was right,” Ric points out. “It was weeks ago that the CDC created that safe zone and we haven’t picked up anything new or different. The military base is closer. We should at least go there, and if it’s a bust, we can go to Atlanta.”

“And here we go,” Matt mutters as he passes through the room with a box laden with survival gear.

Bonnie can’t help but smile. _This_ is an ongoing argument that Ric and Damon have been having for days. North or south, military or civilian, and of course Damon comes down on the side of civilian each and every time. Caroline silently agrees with him, but she hasn’t dared get into the middle of it, and really, Bonnie doesn’t blame the vampires in the slightest for their choice. While the organization and likelihood of safety in numbers and survival is greater within the ranks of the military, it will be a great deal harder for Caroline and Damon to hide what they are and survive. A civilian encampment, on the other hand, is ideal. Civilians are less organized, less observant and more prone to taking things at face value.

_How else could vampires and witches and werewolves have existed for centuries without the masses knowing about it?_

Matt staunchly supports Ric, even though he knows Caroline doesn’t and it’s one of the few points of contention between them. After the Fever, and the Shamblers - both dubbed so by the newspapers and media outlets before they lost coherency and fell into silence - Caroline and Damon’s vampirism, and Bonnie’s status as a witch are much more manageable in his mind.

Bonnie hasn’t picked a side or made a choice yet, but she hasn’t been asked. When she is asked, she will choose and that’s possibly the reason that she’s kept her silence. They can’t afford to be divided, not now, even if Caroline and Damon snipe at each other as much as she and Damon do, and Matt sends seething glares at the elder vampire when he thinks that Damon and no one else is looking. They’re all in this together, a rag tag group of survivors and they do have to depend on each other.

Not really so different from what they were doing when Katherine first waltzed into town, and Klaus as well.

However, the witch is silent because she’ll side with Caroline and Damon, a rarity that she should agree with Damon about _anything_ and even if no one else sees it, she sees the line between supernaturals and humans.

“And it’s only _out of the way_ and a waste of gas,” Damon tosses back. “Also, last I checked, the army didn’t have a recruitment program for vampires.” He rolls his eyes and gives Bonnie a look as she lifts a grimoire out of the box and flips through it. “Whatever. You still can’t take witch cook books.”

“I know that,” Bonnie really doesn’t want to get into another argument. “I just don’t want to leave them lying around for anyone to find. We aren’t the only survivors, we can’t be.” A quick glance around and Bonnie hurries on before Damon can scoff, “And if we survived, who’s to say that there’s not another witch out there? One who might be able to make use of these spells in not so nice ways?”

“We could burn ‘em,” Damon suggests and there’s a look on his face that says he’s deadly serious and not simply being an ass because he can be an ass.

“No!” Bonnie’s exclamation is loud. She instinctively presses the grimoire in hand to her chest and only then does she catch the twinkle in Damon’s eyes and the faint smirk he wears. “You’re an ass.” The witch closes her eyes and counts to ten, talking herself down from giving him an aneurysm on general principle.

“So not a news flash,” Caroline says.

When she opens her eyes to smile at her friend, she catches Matt leaning in the doorway, his gaze attentively focused on her. “What do you think we should do with the books?” Looking around, he explains. “Bonnie’s a witch and they’re grimoires, so she should decide.”

“We could lock them down in one of the cells,” Caroline suggests.

It’s not a bad idea. But Bonnie has a better one. She smooths her hand over the cover and gingerly returns the grimoire to the box. “I have the perfect place for them.”

 

###

 

The old witch house is somehow less creepy and eerie in the new stillness of this new world. There is a rustle of wind through the tall grass and the leaves of the trees surrounding the property and birds exchange chirps and calls as though nothing has changed. From the passenger seat of the _borrowed_ \- and by borrowed she means liberated into new permanent ownership - SUV, Bonnie purses her lips and stares at the house.

There are memories, and most of them are not good. Of course, these days there aren’t many places - if any at all - that hold anything resembling good memories. Echoes of Elena and Jeremy are in the Gilbert House and Bonnie hasn’t been back there. She’s wearing one of Elena’s shirts from the boarding house, but only because there was nothing else and she tries not to recall the last time she saw Elena wearing it.

This house is connected to death and Klaus and -

“If we’re going to do this, we need to get moving.” Damon’s voice from the driver’s seat jars Bonnie from her wandering thoughts. “That small pack of zombies we passed back aways? Don’t think they’re _not_ going to follow the sound and moving vehicle -”

“I know.” Uttered so softly that a human wouldn’t hear her, but Bonnie knows Damon hears her perfectly well.

It doesn’t stop him from continuing as though she hasn’t said a word. “ - because I’d like to get in and out before Night of the Living Dead arrives.”

Bonnie shoots him a glare. “ _I know._ ”

“Then let’s do this thing.” Damon does that eye thing that he does and Bonnie sighs, grabbing the passenger door handle. She hops out of the vehicle as Damon does, closing the door softly behind her.

By the time she reaches the hatch of the SUV, Damon has two boxes of grimoires stacked on top of one another and Bonnie reaches for one of her own. She shifts her weight and hefts it to a comfortable position.

“You got that?” Damon asks.

She doesn’t dignify the dig with an answer, hurrying ahead of Damon toward the house.

The witch is not surprised when Damon is in front of her, holding out a hand for her to pause. The vampire puts the boxes down and glances back the way they came, then nudges the door with a foot. It creaks and it sounds like a wail in the stillness. Bonnie bites her lip and looks around again, though they’re still alone in the yard. She breathes out softly, supporting the box with first one uplifted thigh then the other.

Damon hesitates at the threshold, then steps inside. Bonnie can see his shoulders tighten and relax beneath his dark shirt, his head tilting as he listens to sounds she can’t hear - and might not wish to hear. He takes another step, and there’s a faint creaking of wood, not nearly as loud as the door opening, and though Bonnie is beginning to feel as though there are one hundred eyes on her and like _something_ will come shambling across the unkempt and long neglected yard. Still, she doesn’t rush the vampire. The witches didn’t particularly care for the vampire, and though they have denied Bonnie access to the vast majority of their power, sometimes she imagines she still _feels_ them there.

“Empty,” Damon says after what’s only a few seconds, but feels like hours to Bonnie. She can feel the sweat beading at the base of her neck. “Unless your witchy ancestors are hanging around to torture me some more.”

Bonnie shakes her head, stepping past Damon and into the dimness of the house. “They’re gone.” She shifts the box and takes a few more steps into the foyer and looks back to make sure Damon is behind her. Even so, the soft click of the door makes her draw a quick breath. “Mostly.”

Damon frowns at her over the top of the two boxes he’s carrying. “Where are we putting your stash?”

“The cellar,” Bonnie says and leads the way, carefully down the stairs. This is familiar to her, too familiar. Putting one foot in front of the other takes effort. She remembers thumbing through grimoires with Jeremy in this cellar, remembers the tears on Elena’s face as she reassured her friend she was alive and well. She remembers casting the spell to save Elena from vampirism and being too late for Jenna . . .

Shaking off the memories, Bonnie whispers softly and the candles left behind flicker into life, illuminating the darkness. She continues down the stairs and forward, knowing that if she stops the past will rear up and charge at her. They can’t afford that sort of distraction right now.

A section of the floor pulls away to reveal a chamber about two feet deep.

“Didn't know that was down here,” Damon remarks with a note of genuine surprise in his voice.

“I did a lot of exploring while I was hiding out from Klaus.” That’s all Bonnie has to say about that.

Evidently that’s all that has to be said, because it’s a rare moment of Damon not pressing the issue.

Kneeling in the dusty floor, Bonnie begins moving the grimoires from the box she carried in and into the hidden creche. Damon sets his boxes down beside her and gives a curt nod. “I’ll go get the other boxes.”

Bonnie is only starting on the third box when Damon arrives with three more. She freezes at the sound of footsteps overhead, and doesn’t release the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding until Damon calls out softly that it’s him coming down the stairs. Pausing her book stashing, Bonnie watches him, having a rare moment of being surprised by the vampiric abilities - how he manages to navigate with three boxes, piled so high he can’t see, but still every step is careful and sure.

“Two more. Move fast. They’re getting closer.” Damon tells her and he’s gone quicker than Bonnie can give any sort of acknowledgment.

In the silence of the cellar, Bonnie focuses on carefully moving the books, but she does it as quickly as she can. A chill passes over her, like cold fingers edging along her spine and one of the books tumbles into the hidden chamber with a thump that sounds as loud as a gunshot to her ears. Jerking her head up, Bonnie looks around, peering into the far corners where the candlelight doesn’t quite reach.

The candles flicker and sway, flames dancing on their wicks and there is _something_ -

A blink and the shadows are still.

“Stop imagining things. There are enough horrors right outside that you don’t need to make any up,” Bonnie mutters under her breath.

Again comes the sound of footsteps, moving quickly enough that Bonnie knows they belong to Damon even before the dark boots are visible on the stairs. The vampire kneels on the other side of the chamber beneath the floor and silently helps Bonnie add the books.

“There are about five in the yard,” Damon tells her conversationally. The last books go in and Damon grabs the planking to fit it back in place. “We are going to go upstairs, and I’ll clear the way if I have to. You just run for the car, got it?”

Bonnie doesn’t argue. There are reasons that Caroline and Damon go out for the supplies. She has no intentions of getting too close to one of the Shamblers. It’s rare that she doesn’t argue, but Bonnie knows the score. Safety and survival first. Live to actually be able to trade barbs with Damon another day.

Damon ascends the stairs first, Bonnie close at his back without being on his heels. They’re in the kitchen - or what once was the kitchen - when Damon puts his hand out, signaling that she should stop. Bonnie does and catches her breath, and then comes the words that make her blood freeze.

“Stay. Still.” Damon hisses, demonstrating by not moving a single muscle.

Bonnie wonders what it says that she can read the tension in his back and the tightening of his jaw that she can see in his profile. Has she been spending _that much_ time with Damon Salvatore since the world went to crap, or were these signals there and readable before life as they knew it ended?

She can’t see what he sees or hear what he hears, but Bonnie trusts his reactions. _That_ is unexpected. Under normal circumstances, she trusts the blue-eyed devil about as far as she can throw him without magic, but these aren’t normal circumstances and Damon’s her best bet for protection from a Shambling horde.

It really _is_ the end of the world.

Damon looks around, casting his eyes in various locations around the kitchen. The look is intense and full of scrutiny, and then his hand is over her mouth with a quick, hushed, “Shh!” and _they’ve moved._ Across the kitchen as quick as Damon could carry her, wedging them both into the dusty, dank pantry, slowly pulling the door closed behind them. A sliver of light from the outside world filters through the cracked door, illuminating Damon’s profile, making one eye a pale contrast to his pale skin before he pulls his head back slowly.

In the cramped space, Bonnie is pressed against his back, trying to slow her heart and keep her breathing slow and steady. She wants to ask what he saw, how many there are - but then she hears the shuffling gaits and thumping sounds of dead weight shambling. Bonnie doesn’t have to ask - if Damon thought they could have run for it, they would have run for it.

_There are too many of them._

Squeezing her eyes closed, Bonnie tries not to focus on the shambling dead or where they came from and how they got there so quickly. Instead she focuses on breathing, of soothing herself. Calling upon meditative exercises she’s used to focus and connect with her energies. She catches herself clenching one hand into a fist, balling the other into the back of Damon’s shirt and forces her hands to loosen and relax.

It’s not easy.

The shambling stops outside of the pantry and Damon leans back. It’s a move that presses her uncomfortably into the shelf behind her, but she bites her lip against protest. Bonnie counts to ten, then twenty, and then the shambling moves on. Even so, Damon doesn’t relax, meaning that Bonnie can’t relax.

Damon moves, his hand reaching back and finding hers to press something cold and metal - the car keys - to her palm. “When I open this door, you're going to run to the car. _Don’t_ worry about me.”

“Damon.” It's instinctive, really, the way Bonnie's hand clutches at his arm and the hem of his shirt, holding him in place. No other words come because she's suddenly half-embarrassed for clinging to him, half-confused for wanting to do such a thing and entirely off-kilter for not being ready to handle this. _I faced down Klaus, I can do this._ Of course it's different when you're resigned to death than when you _want_ to live.

The vampire stills, and Bonnie's glad that he can't see her face when his hand reaches back to grasp her elbow. She knows that she has to be wearing a look of complete surprise because she knows the touch is meant to be supportive, comforting even and it's not the normal for Damon -

_How much trouble are we in?_

“You're a bad ass witch, Judgy. You can do this.” The words are a contrast to the touch, intentionally snide and laden with snark and Bonnie _hears_ the smug smirk in his voice. He's doing it on purpose, something inside of her tells her that, but it doesn't matter. The attitude and cockiness are familiar, they're enough to have Bonnie straightening her shoulders, enough to have her step away from him though there's really nowhere to go and jerk her elbow away from his touch.

He looks back at her, and then he’s gone. The door is open, there’s the sound of a scuffle and Bonnie does what she was told to do: she runs.

Something grapples at her arm, at her hair and she keeps her eyes on the target - the open front door and the car beyond. Damon is clearing a path for her, and she takes it, feet flying and arms pumping, running like she hasn’t since cheerleading. Bonnie doesn’t count the Shamblers. She’s aware of them - five, seven, eleven and then she just stops processing. Dodging bloody, stumped hands, skidding past determined fingers and lunging arms until she literally yanks open the car door, throwing herself into the driver’s seat.

Hands grip the steering wheel, ignition key digging into her palm. A bloody palm smacks the window and Bonnie yelps. It takes a few minutes of fumbling but the key is in the ignition and she guns the engine to life, looking back for Damon.

Another squeak escapes her as the passenger door jerks open and Damon scrambles in, pulling himself up by one arm while kicking away an offending zombie.

“Drive!” Damon orders as two more zombies launch themselves at the vehicle.

Gulping, Bonnie slams the SUV into drive and guns it away from the witch house, trying not to throw up at the sickening crunch and thuds of the zombies she plows right through.

 

###

 

Bonnie heads up the stairs the moment they step inside the boarding house. Well, heads up is actually a weak description for what the witch does. Without a word to Caroline or Ric who’ve come to see for themselves that the pair made it back from the witch house safely, she flees up the stairs as though if she arrives quickly enough, it will present her with a switch that turns back the clock and makes life normal again..

Damon watches her and then heads right into the study, and directly for the bar and the bourbon.

Ric follows. It’s to be expected, after all. Just as it’s to be expected that Caroline flies up the stairs after Bonnie and Damon can hear the retching and stomach heaving as he pours himself a drink. Supernatural hearing is a real bitch sometimes.

“What happened out there?” Ric asks.

Damon stares at the fireplace. Drinks the glass of bourbon and pours another. “I didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t say you did. You have a complex.” Ric comes around to his peripheral view and stands there until Damon turns to look at him.

“Sorry.” Damon swirls the liquid in the glass and takes a drink. “I’m used to dealing with Stefan. It’s always my fault.”

“Is it your fault?” Ric frowns. He takes Damon’s glass and takes a drink, then passes it back. “Whatever _it_ happens to be.”

“Only if I’m responsible for the plague of zombies tearing apart the world.”

Ric walks to the bar and begins making his own drink. “Is there any point in time where this conversation is actually going to make sense? Or am I going to have to be drunk for that to happen?” Ric takes a drink and rejoins Damon at the fireplace. “What happened out there, Damon?”

“What _always_ happens out there, Ric?” Damon challenges as he gives his friend a look. “Zombies. More of them than I was expecting.” Damon shrugs. “The witch got a little rattled.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Damon drains his glass and shoves it at Ric. “Not really.” He leaves the man alone in the study because Damon is not about to do the warm-fuzzies and friendly chitter chatter about his thoughts and feelings, and how he screwed up.

The door was supposed to be closed. Damon swore the door to the house was closed, but if it had been closed, then there wouldn’t have been zombies shuffling through and he wouldn’t have been hiding in an old dusty pantry with a seventeen-year-old witch clinging to his shirt.

He wouldn't have almost gotten Elena’s best friend killed.

Alone in his room, Damon clutches the vervain necklace in his fist. “I’m sorry, Elena. It won’t happen again.”

 

###

 


	8. the woods are lovely, dark and deep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plan was good. The execution, not so much. She understands the reasoning, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that it’s not good reasoning. What happened, happened. It wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t Damon’s fault and even if she could fire a weapon, it’s not like she would have gone into the old witch house armed.

With a twang and a soft swoosh, the arrow flies through the air. It arches smoothly upward and then downward, embedding itself in the throat of the dummy attached to the tree. Bonnie can’t help but sigh in disappointment, relaxing her back as she lowers the crossbow. It eases the weight on her arms as well and she rolls her neck.

“That was good. That’s a lot closer to the head,” Caroline enthuses. “You’re getting better.”

Bonnie knows that Caroline is trying to help and she gives her a smile and a gold star for effort. “Thanks, Caro, but getting better isn’t the same as being good.” Bonnie hands the crossbow to Caroline’s waiting arms, glad for the reprieve and envying the way Caroline easily cocks, reloads and cranks it, but not the reason that Caroline _can_ do so with ease.

“I don’t know why we’re doing this.” She shakes her head, feeling her single ponytail bounce against the light perspiration on the back of her neck. She hasn’t checked the time and has lost track of how long she and Caroline have been out here so that Bonnie could practice with the lightweight crossbow that Ric and Matt thought would be a weapon that Bonnie would be able to handle. A distance weapon, one that would keep her out of direct melee.

The plan was good. The execution, not so much. She understands the reasoning, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that it’s not good reasoning. What happened, happened. It wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t Damon’s fault and even if she could fire a weapon, it’s not like she would have gone into the old witch house armed.

Looking back at the Salvatore mansion isn’t required to know that there have been eyes and faces at the upstairs windows - the ones not boarded over - since she and Caroline wandered out after breakfast, armed with the crossbow, bolts and took up a position the requisite distance from the target dummy and tree.

“So that you can defend yourself against zombies,” Caroline explains gently, handing the crossbow back to Bonnie.

“I’m starting to think I should just practice running.” Bonnie takes aim, concentrates and releases the bolt.

This one lands in the jaw of her imaginary - and stationary - zombie attacker.

“And wow.” Damon’s voice somewhere behind them makes her jump, though thankfully she doesn’t squeal or cry out. Just a flinch of surprise and a glare thrown over her shoulder as he invites himself to join them. “Now, that zombie won’t be saying anything or eating anything.”

“If you just came to heckle, you can leave,” Caroline tells him, shoulders back and chin held high.

Damon curls his lip up, giving her a scowl and slightly wrinkling his eyes - and pretty much saying more with his face than he can with any number of words. Bonnie wonders how it is that Damon seems to have mastered the ability to communicate with looks and facial tics, and then wonders if there is _anyone_ who can actually interpret and understand the entirety of his peculiar language. “I didn’t come to heckle, Blondie.”

Giving a gentle tug on the crossbow, Damon pulls it from Bonnie’s hands. She releases it without a second thought because it does get heavy and bulky, and Bonnie is happy to _not_ hold it between shots. Damon holds out his hand to Caroline for a bolt, and receiving it - with a dark look and loud flesh slapping clap to his palm that has to sting or break bones - at least temporarily - begins to reload the crossbow. “I came out here, because . . . I’m wondering the same thing you are.”

The vampire doesn’t look as he aims the crossbow and looses the bolt. “Why _are_ you doing this?”

The bolt hits the ‘zombie’ squarely in the forehead with a loud thunk.

“Show off,” Caroline huffs.

Bonnie rolls her eyes, not at Caroline because she completely agrees with her best friend’s assessment that Damon is showing off, but at Damon’s antics. The witch crosses the distance to the tree and begins tugging on the first crossbow to free it. “So that I can defend myself and protect myself. I might not always have someone to watch my back.”

She draws a breath, and tenses before relaxing as she feels Damon’s presence _right behind_ her. One of the most exasperating things about the man is that he has no sense of personal space or simply doesn’t care that other people do. Bonnie is ready to step to the side or elbow him into giving her some space when one of his hands wraps around hers and the other reaches around her other side, grabbing the crossbow bolt in the ‘chin’ of the ‘zombie.’

It effectively traps her in the cage of Damon’s arms, sandwiching her between him and the tree. It’s intimidating and uncomfortable - both of which the witch is certain are intentional. Bonnie is _this close_ to sending him a scathing aneurysm when he tugs the bolts free in unison and hands them to her as he turns and steps smoothly to the side to free the third bolt. “Yes, but you’re _a witch.”_

“I don’t think that makes me immune to zombie bites.” Bonnie glances at the bolts in hand and reaches for the third one, only to have Damon hold it just out of her reach.

“No, but it means you don’t need _this_.” Damon waves the bolt for emphasis.

“What’s she supposed to do?” Caroline asks.

“She’s supposed to use her powers.” Damon is answering Caroline but his gaze is focused on Bonnie. In the bright light of the day, his eyes are clear and as blue as the overhead sky, and unsettling in their intensity. It’s the one thing about Damon that has always unsettled Bonnie - the depths of intensity in those eyes that make her want to look away and make it nearly impossible as well.

_I’m sure it’s the reason that he’s always had such an easy time compelling his victims. They’re trapped before they know it._

Blinking, Bonnie shifts her gaze over his shoulder, stretching on her toes to reach for the third bolt. “Like what? I didn’t see any spells in the grimoires for fighting zombies.”

Damon lowers his arm and allows her to have the bolt. “That’s because you’re not thinking about it strategically.” His dark head tilts, his eyes still zeroed in on her though he has to realize she’s taking a break from meeting his gaze. “What about that thing you do where you use your Jedi mind powers and toss me across the room like a rag doll?”

Her attention slides back to Damon, her eyes meeting his. She hates herself for it, but Bonnie feels the corners of her mouth turn up slightly in smug pride. “It’s a simple knock back spell. I just knock you back if I don’t want you close.” The witch blinks, considering. “But that doesn’t help me. It’s not like I can knock back more than a few at a time, and they still get back up.”

“But it buys you _time.”_ Damon points out as though it’s the most logical thing in the world. “You can run, you can hide, you can arm yourself. You can pick them off and let one of us move in.”

Biting his lip, Damon acknowledges Caroline with a quick glance, but his attention quickly returns to Bonnie. It’s a bit unsettling because Bonnie is certain Damon hasn’t been this fixed or focused on her since the night she faked her death to throw off Klaus. “And the aneurysms? How does that work?”

“It’s an aneurysm.” Bonnie heaves a sigh. “I don’t think it would work on zombies. That works on you because your physiology is still enough intact that it hurts and incapacitates you. They don’t feel pain.”

“Maybe not, but can you modify it? Instead of just blowing blood vessels, can you blow them all at once? Make their brains explode inside their heads?”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to object, but Bonnie stops herself. She can’t object because she doesn’t know. She’s never tried to do such a thing. It’s overkill for putting down a regular vampire, but it’s not so dissimilar from what she was doing to Klaus after the ritual. “I ... don’t know.”

Damon gives her a slow forming, conspiratorial grin. “Would you like to try?” Quick as a blink, he’s plucking the crossbow bolts from her fingers, tossing them at Caroline and leading Bonnie across the yard with his hand gently wrapped around her elbow. “Let’s go into town for some experimental target practice.”

They’re across the yard and almost to the house and up on the back stoop with Caroline trailing behind them, protesting before Bonnie snaps to and has the presence of mind to give a jerk to her arm. “I _can_ walk, thank you very much.”

By that time Ric and Matt are spilling out, Matt looking as though he’s ready to take on Damon all on his own, which Bonnie recognizes as being an uneven and easily lost match before it’s start. Ric looks concerned and ready to intervene calmly, a prospect that will yield better results than challenging one more than a century old vampire.

Also, Damon _listens_ to Ric.

“What’s going on here?” Ric folds his arms across his chest.

“Oh please Ric don’t get your tighty-whities all in bunch.” Damon rolls his eyes, though he does let go of Bonnie’s elbow. “Bonnie and I are going for a little ride into town.”

“You’re making her go on a supply run?” Matt takes a step forward, but Ric subtly shifts his body into Matt’s path.

Damon’s face takes on a mask of utter boredom. He chooses not to even look at Matt or respond to the inquiry. “We’re going to see if she can use her witchy-ju ju against zombies. Unless,” Now Damon looks past Ric, his head tilting as he studies Matt, “You’d like to be a guinea pig?”

Caroline glares at him and snaps. “Damon.”

“Bonnie, are you okay with this?” Ric turns his gaze on her.

“Yeah, Alaric.” Bonnie nods her head. “You guys saw me with the crossbow. I sort of suck.”

“Oh, don’t hold back, we’re all friends here,” Damon tells her. “You really, really suck.”

Ric’s light eyes move between the pair, and scrubbing his hand over his head, he sighs. “I’ll get the keys. I’m coming with you.”

A brief argument later, mostly over which vehicle to take and who’s driving and they’re pulling slowly into downtown Mystic Falls. They’re in Ric’s truck, with Damon behind the steering wheel and Bonnie tucked into the passenger seat. The streets are empty and quiet, though experience has shown that such won’t last long.

“What’s the plan again?” Ric asks. “To sit here until zombies appear?”

Damon looks back over his shoulder and gives an exaggerated eye roll. “No. The plan is to go zombie hunting.” He waves to the crossbow on the floor of the backseat. “Ric, grab your crossbow. Bonnie, do whatever you do to get ready. We’re going to go up to the top of the town hall building. Best view of the town square and plenty of opportunities to pick off zombies.”

 

###

 

Damon likes being right.

It’s easy pickings from this vantage point. It’s like one of those fraternity parties filled with drunken, half-dressed sorority girls; a veritable all you can eat buffet.

_Make that an all you can kill buffet._

Bonnie stands by the edge of the roof, hands resting against the low protective wall. It took her a few tries and a little bit of trial and error to figure out how to use the power and what to do, but since then, she’s been picking off the zombies at a steady rate of one or two every ten minutes. Her gaze is focused, though while Damon expects to see tension in her body, there is none.

She’s merely a girl with a mission, nothing more and nothing less.

Damon half-perches on the retaining wall, one foot on the ground and one leg folded next to him. It’s difficult to know which zombies the little witch is targeting, not immediately. There are signs though, as one of the pack begins to slightly alter its gait, turning more shambling and unfocused right before blood bleeds through its eye sockets and out of its ears. It drops to its knees and just _stops._ Granted, Bonnie’s method isn’t very dramatic - not once she figured out how to stop blowing the tops of their heads off and creating a puffing cloud of red and gray matter - but it works.

“All those dead witches that you’re channeling,” Damon says when she takes a break and reaches for the bottle of water by her hand, “And you can’t pick them off in droves? You’re stuck doing one or two at a time?”

Bonnie takes several long swallows and then makes recapping the bottle a fine art. “I don’t have it anymore.”

Damon shifts, turning to face her completely. He frowns a bit, “What?”

“I’m cut off from that power. The witches took it away after I brought Jeremy back.” Bonnie looks down at the bottle and picks with the label with her nail. After her a moment, her eyes lift and her emerald gaze shifts back to him. “They said that I abused their gift, that I used it to twist the laws of nature.” The label peels back in an easy strip and the witch winds the bottle out of the wrapper instead of unwinding the wrapper from the bottle. If Damon was into psychology, he’d say that meant something, but as it is he can only see it as contrary to what other people would do.

Contrariness is not a trait that he dislikes.

When the bottle has been freed of its wrapper prison, Bonnie places the bottle back on the ledge and releases the wrapper to float to the ground below. “They said that there would be consequences for me bringing back Jeremy. Maybe this is it.” She rests her palms against the retaining wall and looks out over the shambling zombies shuffling through the streets of Mystic Falls.

It takes Damon a moment to process what she’s saying. Then he gives her a slow blink. “ _This_? You think that you caused _this_?”

One of Bonnie’s shoulders lifts in a half shrug. “Zombies aren’t exactly normal even for us. This is a perversion of nature.”

Damon scoffs. “Look . . . I _liked_ Jeremy.” Funny how acknowledging that he didn’t dislike someone as much as he claimed comes easier once they’re dead. “Not as much as you did obviously, but I don’t think that raising one teenage boy from the dead brought the zombie apocalypse down on our heads.”

“Something did.”

“But not that.” Ric has been walking the perimeter of the roof, and stops on the other side of Bonnie. “I admit that our lives are all kinds of screwed up and have been for a while, but if _love_ caused this -” Ric waves his hand toward the zombies on the ground beneath them,  “ - Then the metaphysical laws of nature and the universe itself are _fucked._ ”

Bonnie’s head whips to Ric at his words and Damon guffaws. “Wow. Ric, way to completely shed the responsible teacher skin once and for all.” Damon flashes the man a grin, “Do I need to wash your mouth out with soap?”

“Shut up, Damon.” Ric rests a hand on Bonnie’s shoulder. His gaze flickers briefly back to Damon and then focuses on the teen witch. “Bonnie, _you_ didn’t cause this. We don’t know what did. We might never know what did, but you didn’t. No matter what a bunch of dead witches might have led you to believe. You have to believe that, okay?”

There’s a long moment where the young woman doesn’t answer. Damon rolls his eyes and turns back to watching the zombies. He alternates between picking out the people he knew and making up stories about the ones he didn’t.

“I will. I’ll try,” Bonnie says finally.

“If the heart to heart is over, can we go back to blasting zombies?” Damon asks. “I sorta liked it when you popped their skulls open.”

“That was gross.”

“I like to think of it as entertainment.” He blinks innocently off Ric’s chastising look and Bonnie’s oh-so-delicate frown. “What? There’s no television anymore.”

 


	9. miles to go before i sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Who died and made you leader?" Damon is snarky as ever.
> 
> Ric glares at him. "The whole damn world and practically everyone we cared about, you dick."

“Oh. My. God.” 

Those are the only words that Bonnie’s mouth can form when she peeks open the front door of the Salvatore Boarding House and sees the large RV rolling slowly up the driveway. 

“He’s kidding, right?”

“Never thought that was a sight that I would see.”

The comments come from Matt and Ric respectively as they join her in the doorway. 

Matt lowers his crossbow, as Ric lowers his stake shooting wrist as well. “He doesn’t really think we’re going to travel in that thing?”

“I’m pretty sure he does.” Ric slaps Matt on the shoulder and steps outside. He pauses just beyond the doorway, his head automatically turning as he scans the yard and surrounding area. Bonnie reflects briefly that there was a time when going outside didn’t involve doing a quick search for roaming packs of flesh eating walking dead.

“I’ll stick to my truck, thanks,” Matt says.

Ric glances back at the younger man. “You mean the one that’s still parked in your driveway in the more zombie infested area of town?” It’s gently chastising, and not meant to be cruel, because Bonnie doesn’t think that Ric can actually be intentionally cruel, but the words do sober Matt. Ric nods with a half-sympathetic smile. “I think I know where Damon is going with this and it’s not a bad idea.”

The vampire in question brings the RV to a halt as close to the front door as possible, where he and Caroline disembark. 

“You’re driving this?” Ric calls out in greeting. “I have to say, I really never thought I’d see that day that Damon Salvatore went RV-ing.” 

“I’m not driving it.” Damon flashes Ric a grin that somehow manages to be filled with a boyish innocence that Bonnie doubts Damon has possessed since he was a young boy. He flicks his wrist and the sunlight catches on a spark and flash of an object as it soars through the air right before Ric reaches up and plucks them out. As Ric opens his hand and blinks at the key, Damon continues, “You are. I’m driving the Hummer.”

Ric frowns at him. “We don’t have a Hummer.”

“No, but Garry Emerson did.” Damon dangles the keys. “I’ll be going back to pick it up after the incoming wave of Shamblers passes us by.”

Caroline throws her arms up. “I told him that he doesn’t have to steal everything that’s not nailed down just because he can.”

“It’s not exactly stealing, Caro.” That it’s Matt that answers surprises Bonnie. “It’s pretty much open season on whatever is left.”

“See? Even the jock understands the new system of possession,” Damon smirks.

### 

"I want to stop and check on my Dad." Caroline launches in without preface or preamble. Lead in on this topic isn't required. The young vampire knows her audience and knows that the quickest way to cut to the quick - and get past the arguments and eye-rolling - is to simply lay it out there.

Not that she isn't prepared for arguments; her counter-arguments are lined up. Caroline is ready for the snark, the pity, the hopelessness, all of it. Those reactions don't - and won't - matter because she's not going to back down in this, no matter how stubborn and controlling she has to be.

Everyone knows how much of a control freak Caroline Forbes is.

"Your who?" Damon asks. He's standing in the open door of the Hummer, leaning over the top of the vehicle while he and Ric strap a traveling compartment to the top of it. Her half-creator - because Caroline still hasn't decided if Damon's blood makes her his creation, or if Katherine's murdering hands make her Katherine's creation, and until then they both get to share that twisted responsibility - hasn't looked back at her.

"My Dad," Caroline repeats. She easily slings a case of water in the back of the Hummer, as though it weighs nothing. "I don't know what happened to him. Whether he's dead or alive, and I'd like to know."

She watches the muscles in Damon's back flex beneath his dark t-shirt, and her eyes are - unwillingly - drawn to the way they cord and ripple in his arms as he pulls and tightens the cable holding the box to the top of the Hummer. Good looks and a body like that should not have been wasted on such an asshole.

"He's probably dead," Damon says. Simply, easily. Without a glance in her direction, without a single bit of feeling. He could just as easily be discussing the weather or asking Ric to pass him a beer. “Zombie food, or if you’re very lucky, he’s a zombie.”

The words hit her like a stinging slap. Caroline draws in a sharp breath and hisses it out. Heat burns inside of her and there's no recollection of making the decision to move. But move she did, because suddenly, Damon is on the ground and Caroline is bent over him and she can feel the veins pulsing around her eyes and the fangs pushing through and down. "We're going to check on my Dad, you asshole."

"Are we going to fight for it?" Damon smirks.

Caroline really wants to wipe that shit-eating smirk right off his face. She wants to punch him and see something else in those crystalline blue eyes other than smug satisfaction. "If I have to."

This was not how it was supposed to go down. Arguments and teasing, yes. Reasonable debate, certainly. Damon's complete and utter selfishness and cruelty -

_I should have expected it from him._

Caroline knows first hand how malicious and cold Damon can be when it suits him. Or when it's just too much work and effort to be anything else. She jerks him up and slams his head against the gravel for emphasis and both hates herself for doing it and enjoys the satisfying sound his skull makes in the late afternoon air.

She hates that he can push her buttons so easily.

"You don't want to start this fight with me, Cheeerleader Barbie." The world spins and shifts, and there's barely the blink of an eye, the skip of a heart to brace herself before she's winded by the force of being lifted up and slammed back into the Hummer. Pinned by the neck, she gasps for air, fingers tugging at Damon's even though some distant part of Caroline registers that she doesn't need to breathe.

But she's young and her body still has expectations and she can't quite focus on turning them off as she scratches at Damon's hand and pushes her feet against his abdomen.

"I. Will. Win," Damon grounds out, his face mere inches from hers.

"Hey! Hey!" Caroline doesn't know if it's Matt or Ric who's calling out for interference, but she doesn't need them in the middle of it. She finds leverage and kicks Damon away. Caroline pays no attention to how far he goes or where he lands, instead taking long droughts of air that she doesn't need. Her hands go immediately to her already healing bruised throat.

"Asshole," Caroline repeats.

"Tell me something I don't know." Damon picks himself up off the ground and dusts off his hands. Barely ruffled or mussed up by her attack and it makes Caroline want to launch herself at him again.

She feels a hand on her arm, and looks over to see Ric. Their former history teacher gives her a soft shake of his head. There's a warm, paternal squeeze to her arm. He's talking to her when he speaks, but his gaze is focused on Damon. "Where does your father live?"

"In Finn's Wake," Caroline forces her hand away from her throat. She shrugs her shoulders around, letting the muscles settle and bruises fade away. "It's on the way to Atlanta."

"Then we'll go and check on your father," Ric says quietly. He holds her gaze for a moment, and then gives her a soft, sympathetic smile. "I want to be optimistic, Caroline, but we have to ask that you not get your hopes up."

Caroline nods her head. Her head still aches a little behind the eyes, but even as she realizes it, she also recognizes how quickly the Damon induced headache is fading. Well, the physical Damon induced headache. "I won't. But I need to know. I need closure."

"I understand," Ric says, and with all he's been through and all he's lost, Caroline understands that he means what he says.

"Who died and made you leader?" Damon is snarky as ever, returning to the Hummer and resuming his work as though there had never been interruption.

Ric glares at him. "The whole damn world and practically everyone we cared about, you dick."

Caroline thinks that she might have imagined it, but she thinks that maybe, just maybe, for a split second, Damon Salvatore's face wore a look of surprised hurt.

"Whatever, as long as we don't take too long." Then he's shrugging his shoulders, that mask of bored indifference in place, and Caroline wonders why she gave him the benefit of the doubt of having any feelings at all.

###

Leaving the boarding house and Mystic Falls behind is a bittersweet moment. For Ric, it's only been his home for a little more than a year, but it has been his home. For the others, this is the only home that they've ever known, and he imagines it can't be easy to turn away from it all and walk into the big unknown.

Caroline and Matt are holding hands, as they take one last look around the yard, and Ric gives them their moment of solitude and reflection. Matt is still sitting the fence on accepting the vampires, and on accepting what Caroline is, but he is trying. Trying, Ric figures, is the best they can ask for at the moment.

Circling around to the front of the RV, he stops and gives a half-smile at the sight of Bonnie taking a picture of the boarding house with a Polaroid camera she found somewhere in Stefan's things.

"It still works," the young witch grins as the camera spits out the polaroid film.

"Of course it does," Damon drawls from where he leans against the Hummer with his arms folded across his chest. "Stefan isn't only a hoarder but he's sickeningly nostalgic as well."

For once, Bonnie seems not to be annoyed or rattled by Damon's prattle. She gently shakes the developing picture, bringing back even older memories - happier memories that are older than the girl with the camera, of a time and world gone, and possibly verging on being forgotten forever. It's not a happy thought and Ric gives himself a mental shake to clear away those thoughts.

"It's good he is," Ric says. "You might want to remember this someday."

"I think we'll have plenty of nightmares and zombie corpses to remind us for years to come," Damon replies in his typical bored fashion.

"Are you sure you want to ride with him?" Ric asks Bonnie. "It's not too late to swap out."

Bonnie's smile is faint, but it is a smile. "With who? Matt's your next best option for driving the RV, and Caroline and Damon might kill each other." Not to mention that Matt made it clear that he doesn't trust Damon, doesn't like him and doesn't want to be alone with him.

"I'm surprised you're not on board for Blondie killing me, little witch." Damon plucks the camera from her hand, ignoring her protest, steps back and aims it at Bonnie and Ric where they stand talking. There's a click and the camera spits out another film for developing.

Damon extends the camera to Bonnie and she takes it as though expecting him to extend his fangs and sink them into her throat. "I'm not stupid," Bonnie says after a moment, her gaze searching his, "We need you." She slips the camera strap over her shoulder. "And you need us."

"I need you and your magic," Damon agrees. His pale eyes flicker to Ric and he smirks. "I like Ric. But," Those eyes shift from Ric and Bonnie to Caroline and Matt and back again, "As far as I'm concerned Barbie and Ken are just along for the ride and they're not my problem."

The facade of civility between the vampire and the witch is more telling than anything else of just how much of a game changer leaving really is.

Shaking her head, Bonnie gives Ric an exasperated look that's too old and too knowing to be on such a young face. "See what I mean? Who else is going to ride with him? And we can't leave him on his own."

"No," Ric laughs. "We can't."

Damon snorts and glares. "He is standing right here." He pushes off the Hummer and walks around to the passenger door, calling out as he goes, "Time to go, anyone who doesn't want to be zombie food needs to get their ass moving now."

Ric folds his hands in prayer style and implores Bonnie, "Try not to kill him. Like you said, we do need him."

"No promises, Ric."

It's not long before they're loaded up, and Ric is edging the RV down onto the road behind the Hummer. He takes a look in the side view mirror, imprinting the memory of the boarding house in his mind, and then, he doesn't look back again.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all of those who are faithfully reading, thank you so much!
> 
> I apologize for the slowness of updating, and my only excuse is laziness. I do wish there was some way to directly upload a rich text document, instead of copying and pasting and then double-checking to make sure the formatting is correct. 
> 
> Please keep hanging in, the story is yet untold, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.


	10. back out of all this now too much for us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Is it easier?" Bonnie asks quietly. "Leaving, I mean. You've done it so much, and you know that you'll come back again someday."
> 
> "This time, it's not going to be the same." He peers at her over his sunglasses again, and this time Bonnie can read the resignation and hints of discomfort wrinkling at the corners of Damon's eyes. "No matter what, it's never going to be the same homecoming again."

They leave Mystic Falls without the fanfare that accompanied Bonnie and Caroline - and Elena, though Bonnie is trying really hard to not reflect on that just now - only three weeks ago. On a simple college tour road trip that never went anywhere and ended up back where it all started.

Except that place is an ending now, too.

Bonnie tells herself that they're moving forward, that they're doing _something_ and it means something. It's better than sitting around the boarding house waiting for the horror to pass over and end. In the high heat of late July in Virginia, the only thing that seemed to end was the grass dying from lack of water and an overabundance of heat.

It doesn't stop her from keeping her eyes on the passenger mirror, watching the boarding house grow smaller and smaller until it's obliterated by the following RV and then falls off the horizon completely as they round a bend in the road. With a long sigh, of relief, of loss, of resignation, Bonnie pulls her eyes from the mirror and settles back in her seat and adjusts her seat belt.

"That's amusing," Damon comments. He only gives her a cursory glance as he goes on to explain, "You buckling the seat belt there. I'd think you'd prefer instant death via a vehicular accident than turning into one of the walking dead."

"Are you planning on getting into a vehicular accident?" Bonnie queries. She shifts in her seat, her shoulder to the door and looks at the vampire. Damon's eyes are hidden behind his dark sunglasses, but when he glances at her, she can _feel_ his gaze on her.

"That would be a waste. All this planning, all this packing, just to wrap us around a tree?" Damon stares at her for a moment longer than Bonnie is comfortable with, when his eyes should be on the road. "Besides, the road is a little bit light on traffic."

"Could you watch the road please?"

"Vampire. Reflexes. The only things out there are zombies." Damon's voice is heavy with sarcasm and Bonnie can hear his eyes rolling. He does, however turn his attention back to the road.

Bonnie slumps back against the seat, turning her eyes to the trees breezing past the window. Her hands play idly on the dials with the radio in her lap, thinking of the twin in the RV behind them. They still have cellular phones and service, but the charges aren't going to last forever, and the radios make more sense.

The radio clicks on and Mick Jagger launches into a lamentation about his lack of satisfaction. Bonnie frowns at the radio in confusion, then notices the setting for CD.

The airwaves have been silent for days. Even the emergency broadcasts messages warble in and out, and it took a good hour to pick up the message about Atlanta being a safe zone.

“Figured if you were going to give me the silent treatment, I might as well listen to something,” Damon explains off her look.

“You want idle chit chat?”

“Isn’t that what you usually do on road trips?”

“With people I actually like and want to talk to, yes.” Bonnie returned her attention to the scenery as Mick shouts out his lines.

"Ouch," Damon taps the steering wheel, crooning along with Mick while Bonnie wonders if she’s just entered the Twilight Zone. "Why do you have such a hate on for me, Judgy?"

"Where do you want me to start?" Bonnie props her feet up on the dash, tilting her head to give the vampire a hard look. "Could it be that you're a sadistic, sociopathic killer? Maybe it's because you're an unrepentant manipulator who only thinks of himself? How about the part where you used and abused my friend for months just to get to Stefan and Elena? My Grams death? Rose's death."

The last is a low blow and Bonnie knows it, but still Damon asked for it and it feels good to lash out at him. It's freeing to let the vitriol roll off her tongue and fill the space between them. So much has changed, so quickly, in just a few weeks and it's been weighing her down and pushing at her constantly. She's held back, coped and put one foot in front of the other, but the barn door has been opened, and Bonnie's willing to let the horses free. Taking a breath, Bonnie listens as Mick inevitably realizes that he might not be able to get what he wants, but he may get what he needs.

"You _tried_ to turn Elena into a vampire _against her will_. And minor point? I have a name. It's not Witchy, or Judgy or Glinda or whatever the hell else you can pull out of your ass. You might want to try using it when our asses aren't on the line and we're not fighting for our fucking lives."

Damon shows no sign of being affected by her words. No sign that he's actually heard her aside from the white knuckling of his grip on the steering wheel. For a few moments, the witch thinks she might have gone to far. Damon is unpredictable in the best times and severely unstable at the worse, and playing bait-the-vampire in a moving vehicle is probably not the best idea.

It could be mere seconds or long minutes before Damon looks at her, the look unreadable due to his eyes being so conveniently hidden behind his sunglasses. "Feel better, now ... _Bonnie_?" He waits a second, two, and continues, "Because if you're done ripping me a new one, it'd be really great if you can do your knock back magic on the zombies we're about to come up on."

Bonnie blinks at him, then swivels her head around in time to be tossed against the door as Damon swerves sharply left, then right to avoid the zombies wandering in the road. The RV is not so lucky and as Bonnie watches in the rear view, the over-sized vehicle rolls over them with a sickening thud.

Dead ahead, though, the pack is thicker and Bonnie concentrates, flicking her wrist as she tosses them to the far sides of the road. Once done, she slumps down in the seat, closing her eyes. She can hear Damon moving in the driver's seat, but doesn't have enough reserve energy to look over and see what he's doing. As long as he doesn't run them off the road, or run over any zombies, or decide to finish their conversation by ripping her throat out - the witch is good.

Something heavy and cold lands in her lap. Startled Bonnie jumps and looks down. She blinks in confusion at the energy drink.

"You look like you could use a little pick me up," Damon says, his eyes never leaving the road.

Bonnie blinks at him. Then she opens the can and drinks.

By mutual, unspoken agreement they ride in silence to the background of Paul McCartney leading the Beatles in twisting and shouting, John Lennon’s proclamations of nothing being real and nothing to get hung about before declaring himself to be a walrus before Damon tired of that and surprises Bonnie by letting Freddy Mercury croon about not having an escape from reality.

She knows that she's staring at him, she just doesn't realize how intently she is doing so until he tosses a curious, "What?" in her direction.

Bonnie purses her lips and considers not answering. Freddy just killed a man. “I didn’t take you for a Queen fan.”

“I’ve been around a long time, _Bonnie_.” There's a special lilting emphasis on her name - and why is she not surprised that out of her entire rant, _that_ is the thing he took away from it - and Damon does that unnerving thing where he pulls his eyes from the road for far longer than Bonnie is comfortable, even though the road is clear ahead of them as far as her gaze can reach. He dips his head enough to let her meet his gaze over the tops of the sunglasses. “I have very _varied and eclectic tastes._ ” Somehow Damon Salvatore manages to make the whole sentence sound dirty.

Her hand instinctively wraps around the door handle, her left one tightening on her seat belt. “The road. Damon.”

“You really don’t know how good these reflexes are, do you?” Other than the flippant reply, Damon doesn't taunt her any further. His gaze swings forward, fixed on the open road before them.

"Is it easier?" Bonnie asks quietly. "Leaving, I mean. You've done it so much, and you know that you'll come back again someday."

Thunderbolts and lightning are very, very frightening before Damon answers. "This time, it's not going to be the same." He peers at her over his sunglasses again, and this time Bonnie can read the resignation and hints of discomfort wrinkling at the corners of Damon's eyes. "No matter what, it's never going to be the same homecoming again."

The witch has no answer to that, and this time the silence remains unbroken far beyond Queen's concluding note.

###

They stop for gas around midday. Both vehicles had fuel cans in them, which is convenient, but the car pile up blocking the main highway heading south makes it a good time to add gas. When the going got rough, and it became clear that the virus was doing more than making people sick or simply killing them, everyone tried to flee for the hills. Too many bodies, too dense of a population and not enough road space added up to accidents and road blocks. Weeks later, all that is left are the abandoned cars, and cars filled with those who were too sick to move on, and the virus hit too hard.

Bonnie helps Ric and Matt add gas to their vehicles, while Damon and Caroline scout ahead to see the best path to clear.

It's a hot day, and Bonnie fluffs her ponytail as she tries not to look too hard around the highway that has become a graveyard.

"It's going to be like this all the way to Atlanta, isn't it?" Bonnie asks. She uses her hand as a shield to the sun, gazing to see how far down the road the two vampires have wandered. For all their animosity, the pair of vampires easily teamed up together to do what was too dangerous for their human companions to do.

Ric nods, and settles a baseball cap on his head. It's an odd sight that makes the corners of Bonnie's mouth twitch. She's sure she's never seen him in a hat before. "Probably. The radio was blaring that Atlanta was a safe zone. Everyone, and I do mean everyone wanted to get there."

"Good thing we've got vampires who can move cars," Matt jokes. The humor doesn't quite make it to his eyes, but it's a sign that he's trying and Bonnie reaches out to give his arm a squeeze of encouragement.

"Yes so glad to hear that we can be your beasts of burden." Damon is back, with Caroline on his heels, standing in their conversation circle where he hadn't been only seconds before.

The abruptness of his arrival has Matt taking a step back in startled surprise, hand actually going to his chest. "Jesus! I didn't survive the fucking plague to have a heart attack. Do you have to do that?"

"Vam-pire." Damon looks at the taller man and enunciates each syllable clearly. "Why have all these fantastic abilities that can make you wet your pants if we're not going to use them?"

"Damon likes showing off," Ric says with a dismissive wave of his hand. "You really do get used to it."

"Yeah," Damon smirks at the group, doing that thing with his eyes that Bonnie thinks is supposed to be sarcasm - or flirtation, and Damon flirting with Ric or Matt is not an image she needs in her mind. "Ric hasn't screamed like a girl in at least a month."

Ric gives the vampire a look. One that Bonnie hasn't managed to translate yet, but seems to border between mock annoyance and amusement. "Did you find a path to clear the way?"

The question sobers Damon. "Yeah, we're take it down the right side of the road. More room to work with and plenty of room for the RV if we get that side cleared."

"Good," Matt claps his hands together. "Tell us where to start."

Damon eyes the blond and Bonnie can see the amusement coming long before Damon opens his mouth. She wishes she knew a gag or silence spell, but she doesn't and the words are tumbling out of Damon's mouth as the young witch tries to contemplate creating one. "Right. You and what army?"

"Me," Ric says.

"And me," Bonnie pipes up.

"You have got to be kidding me," Damon flicks his gaze from one to the other.

"Why?" Ric challenges. "Because we're not big, strong vampires like you and Caroline? We may not have your strength or speed, but we can work together and move cars."

It's another one of those moments that demonstrates why it's good to have Ric around. He's the one voice in a thousand to which Damon seems to listen. Some of the time.

"Fine." Damon waves at the row of cars. "Start from the back and just work your way forward." He glances at Caroline, "Come on, Blondie."

"Are you sure you want to do this, Bonnie?" Matt asks as she falls into step between he and Ric. "There are . . . bodies in some of those cars. It might be a little disgusting."

"I'm not a delicate flower, Matt." Bonnie draws a breath and releases it slowly. "I've been treating zombies like exploding pumpkins for a few days. I can handle this, if you can handle it."

Matt grins at Bonnie, and she smiles back because it's another hint of the boy she's known for so long hiding down deep. He's talking to Ric, but the teasing grin is all for Bonnie. "Bonnie always wanted to prove she could keep up with the boys. She had to show us that girls could be just as fast and hardy, Mr. ... Ric." The pause is brief, but it's there. Another sign of change and adjustment. "She did pass CPR though when a bunch of us didn't."

"I guess then, if I'm going to drown or have a heart attack, you'll be good to have around," Ric comments.

They slow as they reach the car, and each comes to a halt. Bonnie can see the head and shoulders of the driver from here, and she bites her lip. She's seen her fair share of dead bodies these past weeks, but it never gets easier.

It never gets better.

"Let's just do this." Taking charge, Ric steps up to the driver side door and wrenches it open. The window has been down, so the body isn't as bloated and dessicated as most, but it still slumps out with a disgusting thunk to the pavement as Ric barely moves aside in time.

A whiff of decomposition and bodily gases, coupled with rotting meat drifts to Bonnie's nose and she swallows back bile as Ric pulls a face and pinches his nose briefly.

"Next time," Matt swallows hard and Bonnie swears he looks a little green. "Will someone smack me if I try to help?"

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took a break from this story while I figured out what I wanted to do with it.
> 
> When I started it, I was both in love with the idea of the zombie apocalypse and frustrated at the direction The Vampire Diaries went with the characters. The results of that came pouring out in a 50,000 word during NaNoWriMo in 2011. It was cathartic. It was fun. It was also rough, unbeta'd adn not as tight and focused as I wanted it to be. As I posted, and re-read, I realized that it also dealt a lot more with characterization and characters than the world around them. Questions that I intended to answer (What happened to the wolves? To Stefan? To Klaus, etc) were never answered. The true feeling of change, loss and the bleakness of surviving in a world that is mostly infested with the living dead never really bubbled to the surface. This disheartened me. 
> 
> "There are layers of story to tell," I said to myself. But how to do it? Do I wipe the slate clean and start from scratch? Do I add in flashbacks and shove passages in where they don't seem to fit seamlessly?
> 
> In the end, after much rumination and re-reading, I decided to keep my hands off the earlier part of the story. I will let it stand as it does, because the beginning of the story has been told and changing it, in any way, would change everything. 
> 
> Going forward is a different story. I want to see the story unfold. I hope to be able to show the world crumbling around our heroes and how it changes them, as it always is with apocalyptic survival stories. Because that is what this is supposed to be at its core: a post-apocalyptic story of how they survived and who they became. So I implore those loyal and faithful readers to bear with me. Posting will be more regular (relatively speaking), but still slow as the story takes blossoms into more than the original script.
> 
> As always, comments and reviews are always welcomed. Let me know your thoughts and expectations, and keep the words flowing.


	11. Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her brows lift and just the faintest twinge as though an invisible string very carefully lifts a corner of her mouth, but doesn't complete the action. "For a minute there you were starting to sound like you gave a damn."
> 
> "Hmph." Damon makes a noise in the back of his throat, following it with an eye roll. "Thank god that passed."

No one knows why it was so aptly named, but approaching the outskirts of town, it's clear the small suburb has seen better days. It could, in fact, be host to its own wake. There's a sign greeting them as they slow and then stop.

'Welcome to Finn's Wake' it reads, or once read before it had the pleasure of meeting the spray cans and bullets of vandals. Old broken beer bottles lay near the base of the sign and the dark matter that discolors the gravel and asphalt near it really doesn't need to be reflected upon for too long. Cars, some abandoned, some still with passengers slumped over steering wheels or collapsed in the backseat, litter the road into - and also out of - the town.

There is a heavy stench in the air, the scent of old sickness, death and decomposition. The stale tang of copper coats the back of Damon's throat, though this time it's hardly appetizing. The blood scent is wrong and off and tainted. He's smelled it often enough in Mystic Falls to recognize the smell of the end. It hadn't seemed as strong or potent back when he and Caroline cleared the highway, but the sun wasn't quite as high in the sky, and these bodies have had another day of stifling Virginia July heat to roast.

"How can anyone be alive in there?" The words come softly from the witch, murmured beneath her breath. If he were human, Damon wouldn't have heard them. He's not human, however, and because of that he looks over at her, a quick quip on his lips.

It dies immediately at the sight of her. Peering through the windshield with a mixed look of deep sadness and horror on her face. Her hands rest on the dashboard, and though she's looking out, Damon has the feeling that she's not so much seeing what's there as what she imagines _might be_ there.

"We made it," Damon says. "It can be done. Just depends on how smart and resilient people are." He doesn't know _why_ he says it. It would be easier to leave her to her wicked imaginings, and it's not as though she needs to be comforted. A frown pulls down his mouth, "Or it might be a wild goose chase."

Bonnie turns toward him, and there's something in her eyes that isn't scorn or chastisement. Damon wouldn't call it friendliness, but it's a few steps away from complete indifference. Her brows lift and just the faintest twinge as though an invisible string very carefully lifts a corner of her mouth, but doesn't complete the action. "For a minute there you were starting to sound like you gave a damn."

"Hmph." Damon makes a noise in the back of his throat, following it with an eye roll. "Thank god that passed."

He throws open the door and is out of the car before the witch can summon a reply. _If_ she's going to summon one. Damon doesn't know, and he's not hanging around to find out.

The others are pouring out of the RV as Damon walks up to it. He hears and feels the witch following a bit behind him, more than he sees her. "Here's the deal," Damon launches in without preamble, "Caroline and I will go in there and look for her father. Everyone else holes up in the RV and waits."

"Why can't we come too?" The jock hovers behind Caroline, and Damon wonders if he's supposed to look supportive or intimidating. Whichever it is, he's failing at both and only manages to look like a hovering ape. "Safety in numbers. We can all stick together."

Damon usually doesn't talk to the boy, but this time he gives him that much courtesy. Or something. "Because you, and Ric, and Witchy are meals on legs. If there are any zombies in there at all, they're probably feeling peckish and will be glad to see you. Caroline and I can move faster, and they mostly ignore us. We're not -" And with that there's a pointed pause as Damon levels a look at the younger vampire, " - Going to spend all night searching the whole town for Papa Forbes."

"But -"

"If he's not at home, then he left or -" A twinge of pain in his head has Damon swiveling his head to glare at the witch. Bonnie tilts her head, gives him a smile and the pain increases marginally. A muscle in Damon's cheek tightens and he glares then turns back to Caroline. "Then. He. Left. We get back on the road and probably meet up with him in Atlanta."

"It makes sense, Caroline," Ric says in that paternal big-brother tone of his. "Searching the whole town will take forever. If he's not here, we'll just assume he moved on."

Turning on his heel, Damon heads back toward the Hummer, stopping to glare at Bonnie along the way. The teen witch is far too smug as she meets his gaze.

"Happy?" Damon asks, words dripping with sarcasm and annoyance.

Bonnie gives him a smirk that could rival his own. "Ecstatic. I knew you could play nice." She brushes past him and Damon realizes that no matter how well they got along on the drive, there are times when he still wants to bury fangs in her throat.

All right, maybe it's possible that he doesn't want to kill her, but shaking her up would be worth the aneurysm she's bound to give him for his trouble.

"If we're going to do this, let's do it, Blondie," Damon calls out over his shoulder. He steps up to the passenger door of the Hummer and holds it pointedly open. "I'd like to be back at base camp by nightfall."

"You don't have to be such an ass," Caroline grumbles as she climbs in.

"You don't have to be so predictable and annoying," Damon retorts.

They drive past the 'Welcome to Finn's Wake' sign in silence.

###

It's the look on Caroline's face when she and Damon return that tells Bonnie everything that she needs to know. There are no words as Bonnie wastes no time clambering out of the RV and crossing the asphalt that somehow seems colder and emptier now, matching the empty sadness in Caroline's dull eyes. She envelopes Caroline in a hug, and the two young women stand there silently in the slowly lowering sun, clinging to one another.

"Great, just what we need right now: a Lifetime movie moment," Damon shakes his head at the display and brushes past the pair. Bonnie's far too concerned with Caroline to give the vampire the glare or scathing remark that he deserves.

"He wasn't there," Caroline says finally. She lifts her head, and shades of the typical Caroline try to peek out. Though her forced smile of optimism and the usual peppy spark in her eyes is dimmed with the hovering tears that Bonnie knows she's refusing to shed. "He left a note that he was going to head to Atlanta. He could have made it out before things got worse, right? He could be there right now." 

"Or brains have become a favored dish of his," Damon calls out.

"Shut up, Damon," Alaric growls. It's not meant to be loud, but it carries in the stillness around them. Still, Bonnie is grateful that he's trying to keep Damon in line. 

"He could, completely," Bonnie agrees with a bob of her head. She suspects her smile is as unsteady as Caroline's and she knows that it comes nowhere near her eyes. But agreement right now plants hope, and hope is what they need. 

"Or he could be dead. He could changed his mind and tried to come to Mystic Falls to find me, or tried to leave me a message - "

"Caroline ... Caroline ... _Caroline, stop._ " Bonnie has to say her name three times, and squeeze the vampire's arms as tightly as possible to get her friend's attention as the blonde starts to derail herself. She really wants to roast Damon right now, and really hates how Caroline chose to start listening to his completely _unhelpful_ mutterings at this particular time. "You don't know. Second and third guessing isn't going to do anything but make you miserable. All you know for certain is that he was alive to leave a message for anyone looking for him. Probably for you. Just in case."

"So what do I do?" Big blue eyes fill with tears, and Bonnie's reminded of when they were seven and Caroline skinned her knee and ripped her new sundress. How she looked up from her bloody knee and held the sundress, desperate for Elena and Bonnie to tell her how she was supposed to tell her mother. 

They aren't seven now, and bandages and haphazardly applied needle and thread aren't going to fix this problem.

But Bonnie has something that might. She hesitates before offering because the outcome is as likely to be bad as it is good, but she'll give Caroline the choice. "Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?" She gives Caroline's hands a squeeze. "Do you want me to do a locator spell?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The editing and re-write of this chapter gave me a lot pain and frustration. In the original version, we followed Damon and Caroline through down, and witnessed Caroline trying to hold it together when her father is MIA. Unfortunately, I was massively unsatisfied with how it came out from Caroline's POV, and the re-write from Damon's was no better. So that entire section, all three passes at it, ended up on the cutting room floor.
> 
> To that end, I know this chapter ends up feeling more like filler than anything else, but it _is_ important to establish what happened to Caroline's father for future developments and plotting.


	12. besides the wear of iron wagon wheels

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You didn’t think about doing this spell before we made our little side trip?” Damon asks.
> 
> “Don’t do that,” Caroline chastises him. “Bonnie’s been saving her energy.”

“You didn’t think about doing this spell before we made our little side trip?” Damon asks.

“Don’t do that,” Caroline chastises him. “Bonnie’s been saving her energy.” She looks at her best friend. “Are you sure you can do this, Bonnie? You don’t have to. If you need to save your energy -”

“I can do it, Caroline. I wouldn’t have offered if I couldn’t.” Bonnie gives Caroline a soft smile. “We’ll be going back some place safe to hole up for the night, and I hopefully won’t need to have any spell magic at the ready. I’ll do the location spell when we’re there.”

Ric expects more of an argument from Damon, but none is forthcoming. The vampire rolls his eyes and says nothing further. Once they’ve found a place to park the Hummer and the RV, a camping spot with an overlook, Bonnie joins them in the RV and starts setting up her spell casting area while Damon perches on top of the Hummer.

“Is Damon not coming in?” Matt asks, peering curiously out of the window.

Bonnie shakes her head without diverting her attention from her preparations. “He’s keeping guard.” She spreads a cloth and a map on the table. “He says that he doesn’t need to watch me play Hermione Granger.”

Ric smirks. That does sound like Damon. “What do you need from us, Bonnie?”

“From you? Nothing.” Bonnie grins at Ric and then turns to Caroline. “I’m going to need your necklace, Caro. That’s the one that your Dad gave you for your sixteenth birthday, right? It’ll create the strongest connection between you and your Dad. I’m also going to need your blood.” 

“Blood?” Matt pales at the word.

“Not a lot, just a drop or two,” Bonnie reassures him, and Ric can see that she’s faintly amused by the look on the young man’s face. Then she sobers, looking at Caroline. There’s a calm, but resigned look on her face. “Caroline, I can’t guarantee anything. If your father isn’t . . . if he didn’t survive. If he’s not alive anymore.”

Caroline bites at her lip and then nods. “But then I’ll know, right? At least then, I’ll have closure.”

“Yeah. You’ll have that,” Bonnie agrees. The two girls hold hands a bit longer and Ric can feel the love and shared history between them, before Bonnie turns away to focus on the spell.

When the candles are lit, and the necklace handed over, Bonnie makes a small cut in Caroline’s finger and holds it over the map. A few drops of blood spill out and run together as Bonnie begins to chant. It’s a soft, low chant and Ric watches in amazement as the droplets of blood began to move across the map, on top of it, without staining it at all. 

The blood trail winds slowly southward from where they are, rapidly at first and then slowing as they reach Atlanta, before stopping there.

###

Watching Caroline go, Ric is reminded again of how, despite all that they've seen and done, these kids are still just that - young kids. Not quite teenagers anymore, not with what they've been through, but not really adults either. They've been taken from normal, thrown into something else and are being tempered by fire. But they are still kids.

Caroline is a little girl who still wants her Daddy to save her from the monsters, even though she is one of the monsters. Bonnie and Matt . . . they’re the lost ones, looking to him for guidance.

"Am I bad person?" Matt asks. The words are quiet and he's not looking at Bonnie or Ric, rather fixing his gaze out of the window of the RV, watching as Caroline goes to join Damon sitting atop the Hummer.

"What?" Bonnie stills, a hand cupped over the candle flame. Confusion and worry color her face as she gazes over at her friend.

"Why would you ask that?" Ric is confused too. The question came from left field and he can't begin to imagine what brought it to the boy's mind. Nothing Matt has done thus far would lead anyone to think that of him, and certainly he wasn't opposed to finding Caroline's father.

Matt pulls his attention from the window, his face drawing in a frown as he looks from Ric to Bonnie. His eyes cast down, and his head dips in a sigh of resignation - or guilt, Ric can't make up his mind and while the former makes sense the latter does not. "It's just that, this whole time, I've never wanted to go looking for my Mom. I didn't even worry about her when I got well."

The young man swallows and lifts his head, and his eyes are shadowed with guilt. "I was worried about everyone else. All my friends, but . . . not my Mom. Not really. I mean, I hope she's okay, but I wasn't going to go looking for her. And I'm not going to ask anyone else to do that."

"My friends mean more to me than my Mom. You guys mean more to me than my Mom." Matt frowns sadly, "That makes me a bad person, doesn't it?"

For not the first time, Ric feels out of his element. Fortunately, Bonnie doesn't.

The young witch reaches out a hand and takes Matt's in her smaller one. "No, Matt. No. You're not a bad person. Look at me." She waits until he lifts his head and meets her gaze. "You were looking out for yourself. You were looking for people that you knew you could trust to watch your back. Your mom, she hasn't been there for you for a long time."

Bonnie shifts closer and gives him a sad, soft sympathetic smile. "She hasn't really been a Mom to you in a very, very long time. Not even when Vicki was missing, or when you buried her. You're a good, strong person, Matt. The whole world has changed and we have to change too."

She shifts her attention to Ric, seeking affirmation and support. He gives her a nod, and then gives another to Matt. "You've been your support since I met you. I'd like to think that we're your surrogate family now."

For a long moment, the not-quite-man doesn't answer, but then his head bobs slowly up and down in the affirmative. "You are. We're all we have now, right?" He gives a quick glance out of the window again, "Seems kinda weird to say that about Damon."

"I don't know," Ric pats Matt on the shoulder. "You're the only one I think that he hasn't tried to kill."

“Really? I feel kinda left out then.”

The words and the retort bring laughter. It's weak and brittle, but it is laughter.

Bonnie begins to roll the candles up in their cloth. "At least we know that we're on the right track, though. If Mr. Forbes is in Atlanta, that must mean that there are survivors there."

"What about your Dad, Bonnie?" Matt asks.

The witch freezes. She swallows and resumes wrapping the candles, giving a shrug to her shoulders. "What about my Dad? He was out of town on business when this all happened."

"You never . . . you never did the spell to look for him."

Bonnie pauses again and this time she lifts tired, watery green eyes to divide her gaze between Matt and Ric. "The spell finds living people. I'm not ready for it to not find anything." She carefully tucks the candles away in the satchel with some of her other spell ingredients. "As long as I don't cast it, I can be hopeful. That he made it, and that he's out there somewhere."

"Yeah," Matt nods. "I guess, I can understand that." Matt sighs and slumps back against the seat. "Maybe when you decide to do the spell for you dad, you can do it for my Mom?"

"Deal," Bonnie agrees, with that sad half-smile that's becoming far too familiar on her face. Shaking her head, she stretches her neck from one side to the other. "I'm going to turn in now, okay?"

She doesn't wait for an answer and pads off to the bedroom of the RV.

"What do you think we'll find in Atlanta, Ric?" Matt asks, watching her go.

Ric shakes his head, "I don't know, but I'm hoping . . . people."

And hope.

###

"What can I do for you, Blondie?" Damon asks as Caroline hops onto the hood of the Hummer beside him.

The day has been too much of a roller coaster for Caroline to be bothered by Damon's attitude and snark any longer. The hope of finding her Dad, and only finding his empty ransacked home coupled with the revelation of Bonnie’s spell has left her a bit emotionally wiped. She glances over at Damon and answers simply. "My dad's in Atlanta."

"I heard." Damon is leaning back against the windshield, hands folded over his chest and he rolls his head to look at her, those eyes the color of silver in the moonlight.

Of course he did. Caroline might have known he was out here eavesdropping.

"That means that we're on track and you don't have to worry about us veering from our destination."

"I suppose that it does." Damon turns his attention back to staring at the nighttime sky. "If that's all, you can run along."

Caroline huffs a breath and mimics his pose, right down to crossing one ankle over the other. "I'm helping you keep watch."

"We're not going to have to talk and bond are we?" Damon asks, his voice heavy with dread and disgust.

"I think we can keep watch for zombies without talking."

"Good."

The silence lasts all of three minutes before Caroline looks over at the vampire whose blood made her what she is. Curiosity has gotten the better of her, and she poses the question she’s been wondering about since Damon declared they needed to leave Mystic Falls and seek out others and the supposed safe haven of Atlanta. "Why are you so gung ho to get to Atlanta anyway? It's just people that we'll have to be careful around. They don't know what we are and if they're freaked out about zombies . . ."

"They're food." Damon says the words as though he’s talking about stopping by a McDonald’s or a grocery store. 

"What?" Caroline sits up and glares at him. "We aren't going to find other people and eat them Damon!"

"We aren't?" Damon rolls his head to look at her again, that look of measured boredom and indifference on his handsome face. "You haven't really thought about this have you, Caroline? The bagged blood isn't going to last forever, and while the bunny diet is sustainable, we won't be at full strength feeding on animals."

He sits up and gives her a hard look. "That means defending our friends?" Damon waves a hand at the RV. "Is going to be hard. We have to eat, preferably human blood. Once the blood bags dry up, we need another source. Even if Ric and Bonnie and the Quarterback are willing, they can't sustain us indefinitely.

"Other survivors are what we need to survive."

"You can't - we can't -"

"That's what we do. It's what we are." Damon leans toward her, holding her gaze intently. "I don't know what Stefan was teaching you, but we have other skills that makes hunting and feeding easier. We can hide it, but you need to accept it and not flake on me."

"I'm not flaking! I just never thought that we'd actually have to . . . eat other people."

" _Eat_ ," Damon stresses, returning to his reclined position. "Not kill. Besides, it wouldn't do a whole hell of a lot of good to kill off the food supply."

"How can you be so crass?"

"Vampire," Damon points out. "Same as you. You may want to try looking in the mirror sometime and come to terms with it."

Caroline glares at him. “Let’s go back to not talking.”

“Fine by me. I like you better when you’re quiet.”

“Mutual,” Caroline snips. She doesn’t know whom she’s angrier at, herself or Damon. In the back of her mind she knew those things that he just told her. The bagged blood won’t last forever, and eventually they would have to feed. Caroline won’t admit it to Damon, but Stefan’s bunny diet didn’t go over well with her. She likes the blood from the bags because it is human. It’s sweeter and richer, full of all sorts of tastes and nuances that animal blood doesn’t have.

Her changed body knows that it’s what she should be feeding on, but her mind doesn’t like how much she anticipates it. It partly scares her the warmth uncurling in her gut and the way her gums around her fangs itch at the thought of sinking her fangs into the warm flesh where the blood still pulses beneath the skin. Where the heart pumps it through the veins and into her waiting mouth for her to swallow and sip and -

There is a growl and it takes a moment for Caroline to realize that it came from her. 

Damon is sitting up as swiftly as she made the noise, head tilted as he studies her like she’s something interesting beneath a microscope. “Moderation, that’s what Stefan never learned. He’s an all or nothing type. Restraining yourself hasn’t done anything but make you want it more. You’re going to need to work on that.”

Caroline digs her nails into her palms hard enough to hurt. “I’m fine.”

“You're fantasizing about blood.”

“You don’t know what I”m fantasizing about.”

“Because I’ve never been there,” Damon rolls his eyes. “Skip the blood bag tomorrow and take a taste out of the jock. You may as well start practicing before we run out of the bagged stuff.”

“I’m not going to feed on Matt!”

“Then you’re going to slip up and lose control, and I’m not going to pick up those pieces.” Damon returns gracefully to his position again, and tucks his hands behind his head. “Your choice, just a suggestion.”

“I’m going to keep watch from the other direction.” Caroline doesn’t wait for an answer. In a flash, she’s on top of the Hummer, gazing back toward the RV and beyond. 

She suspects that it’s going to be a very long night.


	13. good fences make good neighbors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t you want to know?” Damon resumes conversation as though it never stopped when they’ve gone at least a good hour without a zombie spotting or a traffic pile up. Unfortunately, Bonnie has no idea what conversation he’s resuming.
> 
> “Know what?” Bonnie asks. She keeps her eyes on the road, force of habit more than necessity. The only thing that will jump out at her is already dead. If it isn’t, she’s pretty certain that the Hummer will do more damage to a deer or other animal than it will to the Hummer.
> 
> “About your father.”

By some unspoken agreement they set out with renewed determination to reach Atlanta by nightfall. Caroline’s hopeful eagerness is contagious, and there’s a sense of accomplishment waiting if they can reach that goal. They stick to the main highways and byways, choosing to ignore the exits that would lead to major cities or even the heart of suburbia. The trip isn’t straight forward or uninterrupted; more than once twisted hunks of metal that were once drivable vehicles, abandoned cars and other transports, or those not so abandoned but still filled with the bodies of those trying to escape the inevitable via speed and the peel of rubber, block the road impede their progress. When it happens, Damon and Caroline clear the road and the two vehicle caravan pushes right on through.

No roaming hordes or packs of zombie cross their path. They see a few here and a handful there, milling around at the edge of the woods or in open fields. Bonnie shivers in her seat as they pass by one on the side of the road, who looks up at her with empty eyes, torn flesh hanging from its mouth, innards falling from his body. He tries to lumber toward the Hummer, but even by then, he’s only a diminishing figure in the passenger window soon to be out of sight.

It doesn’t mean her heart isn’t beating double-time, or that she doesn’t have to close her eyes and take a steadying breath.

“If we’re lucky, they could be dying off,” Damon says conversationally. For whatever reason, Bonnie is his riding buddy again this morning, and it happened without discussion or debate. She dressed, had breakfast and when it was time to get on the road, she climbed into the passenger seat of the Hummer without a word.

She rationalizes that someone needs to ride with Damon and keep him on a tether. Matt is learning to manage the RV, and she also has the ability to easily clear zombies from the road. 

Mostly though, it seems unanimous that - aside from Ric - it’s assumed Bonnie can keep Damon in line. Not that he can get very much out of line in car driving down a long stretch of far too empty highway.

Bonnie peels eyes open to glance over at the vampire. “Why do you say that?”

“We haven’t seen as many of them,” Damon gives a shrug. “It’s either that or someone’s been through here and picked them off.” He’s wearing his sunglasses again, and his crystalline blue eyes peek at her over the tops. “Or, they’ve found better feeding grounds and moved on.”

The witch doesn’t ask what makes him think that or how he knows. He’s a predator, a hunter. It’s in his nature. It’s how Damon thinks and how his mind works. Strangely, Bonnie finds that comparison oddly comforting, which tells her how horribly awry the world has gone. When Damon Salvatore and his predilections are the lesser of two evils and the ones with which she is more comfortable.

Later, after clearing the road yet again, Damon tosses her the car keys with a flippant, “You’re up. I need some shut eye.”

“You _need_ sleep?” Bonnie blinks at him in surprise.

“Not the way that you do, but yes a little rest sometimes goes a very long way.” He settles comfortably in the passenger seat, with his feet propped on the dashboard and in a few moments, he looks to Bonnie to be completely asleep. Of course, it _is_ hard to tell. Damon can be exceptionally still and unmoving just because he’s an unnatural creature.

“Take a picture, Witchy, it’ll last longer,” Damon quips when Bonnie finds herself giving him sidelong glances for the tenth or twelfth time in as many minutes.

Bonnie doesn’t look back over at him after that.

“Don’t you want to know?” Damon resumes conversation as though it never stopped when they’ve gone at least a good hour without a zombie spotting or a traffic pile up. Unfortunately, Bonnie has no idea what conversation he’s resuming.

“Know what?” Bonnie asks. She keeps her eyes on the road, force of habit more than necessity. The only thing that will jump out at her is already dead. If it isn’t, she’s pretty certain that the Hummer _will_ do more damage to a deer or other animal than it will to the Hummer.

“About your father.”

_That_ has her pulling her eyes from the road to look at Damon. He’s lost the sunglasses and is giving her a long, steady, considering look that makes her shift in her seat. Damon isn’t known for long scrutinizing looks unless he’s planning on feeding or killing, or one has the good fortune to look like Elena. Or Katherine. Which is really one and the same and a moot point.

“What do you know about my father?” Are the first words out of Bonnie’s mouth. “Why would you even ask?”

“Curious.” Damon continues to look at her as though he can see right through her and it’s not a good feeling at all. “You have a spell. You used it for Caroline, but you don’t want the same closure?”

“How -” Bonnie stops. Forces her eyes to stay on the road and to pretend that Damon isn’t in the seat next to her, _actually looking_ at her for once. She blows a breath of air and shakes her head. _Of course, vampire senses. He was probably listening to everything. “I_ like having hope. I don’t want to know that he’s dead. If he’s dead.”

“Some people would call that feeding into a delusion.”

“It keeps me going,” Bonnie gives him a hard, sharp glare. She doesn’t know why she’s explaining herself to him, but she is and there it goes. “I don’t expect you to understand that as it’s a human thing.” Bonnie has dealt with enough shit since waking from her semi-coma. She’s not ready to add _that_ to her list of radical world changing events and footlocker of loss. “Could we not talk about this?”

To her surprise, they don’t. Damon falls silent until the next conversation attempt, which comes from Bonnie this time.

“What did you say to Caroline?”

“About what?” Damon asks. “Which time?”

Bonnie considers dropping it. She suspects that Damon needles Caroline for the sake of needling Caroline, and her friend needs to grow a thicker skin. But mounting tensions aren’t good for any of them. “Last night. She’s been put out with you ever since. More than she usually is.” The last has to be added because Caroline does tend to be put out with Damon.

For a few moments, the witch thinks that he won’t answer her. Damon shifts, gazing at the road ahead of them, and then rolls his head back toward Bonnie to pin her beneath his gaze. She can feel the weight of it beneath his sunglasses, though she can’t see his eyes.

“We had a little chat about the food situation. She wasn’t happy with my assessment.”

Bonnie waits. And waits a few minutes longer. Then she shoves her bangs away from her forehead and gives him a quick, peering glance. She’s never known Damon to be cryptic, and she almost doesn’t push it because that’s probably what he wants. “What food situation? We’re rationed out rather well, I think. We’ll have to pick up some stores, just to be safe before hitting Atlanta but -”

“Not _your_ food situation. Mine and Caroline’s.” Damon slides from his slouching position and removes his sunglasses. His gaze, as always is intensely striking.

A heartbeat. Then another.

Snap. Click.

“She doesn’t want to feed off of us.”

Damon nods. “She might not follow Stefan’s bunny diet, but obviously she wants to play by his rules.”

Bonnie tightens her grip on the steering wheel. Not out of fear, because really the way things stand with Damon, she recognizes that at some base level they need each other. They _all_ need one another right now. If he tries something, she can likely take him - or take them both out trying.

Even odds. Though Bonnie _really_ hates thinking of things that way. She’s lost enough. The entire world as she knows it as a matter of fact, and whatever her feelings for Damon Salvatore, he’s one of the few remnants left. He may be  blood-sucking fiend and a murdering sociopath with the self-control of a five year old on red soda and chocolate, but right now he’s a dangerous creature on _their_ side and Bonnie would like to keep it that way.

She’s staring straight ahead, watching the road simply so she can take a few moments to think. Damon is very good at reading the most subtle nuances in reactions and facial responses, perhaps because he wears so many of his own. This isn’t something Bonnie hasn’t thought about. It’s one of those practical thoughts that rears it’s head when she’s trying to sleep at night, or when she wakes in the middle of the night because she thinks she’s heard something shuffling closer.

Caroline and Damon _have_ to eat. They can survive on animals, but if there are no animals nearby, then they have to move up the food chain. It’s really no surprise that Damon has already been there and gone with that thought.

“That’s why,” Damon continues, obviously determining her silence to be silent agreement with Caroline. “We need to find other survivors.”

Bonnie’s head snaps back to look at him. “You can’t just go feeding randomly on the first group of survivors we meet.”

“Oh please,” Damon drawls with more than a little annoyance. “What exactly do you expect us to do? Are you planning on offering up a sip at the Bennett bar?”

Breathe in. Breathe out. Tread carefully because Damon will find the crack in the wall and slip right through it and bring the whole thing tumbling down.

“In a dire, emergency situation . . . if it has to be done, then yes.”

Seldom does one get the pleasure of surprising Damon. Bonnie watches his eyes widen and brows rise, as he gives her a slow blink. The corners of his mouth turn up in a somewhat approving and _appreciative_ smile that has Bonnie’s lips tightening into a line as a shiver goes down her spine and she jerks her attention back to the road. Damon’s approval and appreciation are those few things left that Bonnie’s not certain she really wants to be on the receiving end of.

“Little Bonnie Bennett, how the mighty have fallen.”

“Keep it up, and I’ll rescind,” Bonnie snaps. She slows the car and concentrates. One hand flies from the steering wheel to effectively toss a lone wandering zombie like a rag doll across the road. “I can stop you from getting near my neck.” The words are harsh, but she shivers again as she says them. The witch still remembers the feeling of his fangs at her throat, and the blood pouring from her body, hot and sticky as she gurgled and choked on it.

Instant sweat is on her palms, and she tries to slow her breathing. Tread carefully and _don’t_ give Damon a toe hold.

“I was striking out against Emily, you know that right?” Damon asks as though reading her thoughts. His voice is low, quieter than usual. Almost subdued, maybe even regretful, but Bonnie isn’t up to looking over at him to find out.

“It was _my_ throat you ripped open.”

“Yeah,” Damon agrees with a long sigh. He taps his fingertips on the dashboard. “I’m ... reactionary.” She can hear him moving in the seat, and Bonnie ventures a quick glance over at him. He’s gazing forward again, feet on the dashboard and arms folded across his chest. “It was a mistake.”

A field of dead, half-eaten cows is left behind with crows picking at what zombies left of the corpse. Bonnie keeps her eyes on the road again. “Was that almost an apology?”

“That was an acknowledgment that I might have acted out impulsively.” Bonnie can hear the eye roll in the words.

“Fine. Acknowledged.” If he’s not _truly apologizing_ then Bonnie isn’t going to accept it as such. If this traveling thing is going to work, Damon’s going to have to be more responsible than that. He’s gotten away with so much for so long that Bonnie knows it will take baby steps. The fact that the pair of them are traveling in a vehicle without killing each other shows that baby steps are the right way forward. “How much blood do you need a day, anyway?”

She feels more than sees the surprise in his answer. “A bag can get me by. Two if I’m exceptionally active.”

“A bag is a pint. That’s one pint per day, which is a blood donation.” Bonnie is looking at it logistically so she doesn’t focus on the personal aspects of it. “But you’re only allowed to donate blood every three months -”

“Blah blah,” Damon interrupts. “That’s all - legal federal health and welfare shit. Two or three days is a good recovery time for a healthy human, though lesser amounts can be taken at smaller intervals.” Bonnie feels the weight of his gaze on her. “Trust me.”

For once, the witch will. She isn’t going to ask Damon how he knows that. “Still, there’s only three of us. That’s not enough to sustain you and Caroline without causing us health risks in the long run. Or the short term.”

“Which brings us back to the whole other survivors thing,” Damon comments. “It won’t be like Mystic Falls. The chances are slim that there’ll be vampire hunters and anti-supernatural forces among them. We can be careful and discreet. That’s how we’ve survived for centuries.”

“So you’re saying that the only reason the Founder’s Council knew about vampires and wanted to kill you and Stefan was because you weren’t being discreet?” Bonnie challenges, swinging her gaze to meet his.

Damon gives her a bright, knowing smile. “I wasn’t exactly playing for the home team when I first came back to town.” Damon leans toward her, breaching her personal space in the vehicle when there is nowhere that she can go. His voice is a low, soft leer. “I promise you, not only can I be the epitome of discretion, but they’ll actually like it.”

Bonnie knocks him across the seat with a thought. It’s far more gentle than she normally would have done, earning a soft “oomph” and a laugh from the vampire as he collides with the opposite door. “ _When_ the bags run out, Damon. And don’t for a minute think that you can get sloppy or carried away. I _will_ be watching you.”

Damon snickers. “The world really has come to an end. My favorite judgy little witch is going to let a vampire be a vampire.”

“You need to eat and you’re our best defense against zombies. I’m being practical.” Bonnie glares at him, pinning him to the seat with her magic. “I _will_ be keeping you on a leash, Damon. Don’t push me.”

“Sounds kinky.” Damon waggles his eyebrows. “And fun. I didn’t know you were fond of such perversions.” He’s poking at her and pushing her buttons, but there is something else in that light eyed gaze that has nothing to do with teasing and taunting. There’s an interesting edge of curiosity and hunger and something else that Bonnie can’t put a name to, but makes her swallow hard and her gaze jerk back to the road as she releases him.

“The whole not talking thing?” Bonnie clenches the steering wheel in a white knuckled grip. “We’re going back to that.”

“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say.”

  
Breathe in, breathe out. Tread carefully and don’t let Damon get his fingers any deeper into the cracks.


	14. times were changed from what they were

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They’re people. They’re alive!” Caroline is clearly in Peppy Sunshine mode and is not going to let Ric rain on her parade. Bonnie knows that attitude and knows that Ric has already lost the battle. “What could there be to not be friendly about?”
> 
> “Plenty.” Damon wanders back into sight. He rakes his gaze over Caroline. “Tone it down, Vampire Barbie and let us do the talking,” He takes a breath and clarifies, “By us I mean me and Ric.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is the zombie apocalypse and things aren't always pretty. If this were a television show, this chapter would be TV-MA for violence. Again, it won't always be pretty.

They stop for gas as the day is starting to move toward late afternoon. The RV is fantastic for sleeping and safety, but it’s quite a guzzler when it comes to gasoline. Bonnie is grateful for the reprieve, as it gives her the chance to stretch her legs and take a trip to the bathroom. They are trying to keep the RV usage to a minimum, until they find a good campground to empty it out and top it off at, and she’s tapping Caroline to accompany her into the restroom.

“Safety in numbers,” Bonnie tells the blonde vampire. That’s not the real reason; in reality, Bonnie doesn’t want to go into the lonely on the outskirts of nowhere deserted Uncle Jimmy’s Fuel and Quik Mart.

“If there are any good supplies left, raid the place,” Ric comments as he stops from his circuit of making certain the RV is still road worthy. “I could really use some chocolate and a bag of chips.”

Bonnie laughs. She and Caroline start toward the shop and she blinks, nearly stumbling back when Damon does that thing that he does, planting himself right in their path.

“Be careful,” Damon says, but his gaze links to Caroline’s and all sorts of warning bells and alarms go off. They both know something that they’re not sharing with anyone else.

“What’s going on?” Bonnie asks. She splits her attention between them, waiting for an answer.

“Someone’s been here recently.” Damon only debates it a moment before answering. “And I smell gunpowder. So, _be careful.”_

Someone has definitely been there before them. That can be easily seen by the state of the Quik Mart. The shelves are stripped bare of anything useful and needful. A few cans of shot up beer are on the floor by the coolers bearing bullet holes, and there are empty potato chip bags and chocolate bar wrappers paving the way. The cigarettes and alcohol too, are gone, although there are still magazines in the magazine rack, and evidently condoms are a need of the past.

“So much for supplies,” Caroline remarks with a distasteful wrinkling of her nose.

A quick check is made of the bathroom - because as Bonnie points out, in every zombie movie there’s always one waiting in the bathroom, and once she’s concluded that bit of business, she rejoins Caroline in the store. It’s almost comical that the vampire is pocketing lip balm.

“Really, Caroline?”

“When your lips end up being chapped from too much sun, you’ll thank me.” She opens her mouth to say something else, then closes it promptly, her attention shifting to the storefront window. Bonnie watches, brows knitting together as Caroline makes eye contact with Damon and he vamp speeds around to the other side of the RV where he can’t be seen.

“Zombies?” Bonnie asks.

“No,” Caroline shakes her head, and a slight smile turns up her mouth. “Cars. Cars coming this way.”

Bonnie feels her heart leap in her chest. It’s a good leap, the hopeful happy sort that she’s only felt when it’s her birthday and her Grams and father were keeping a surprise, or when the cute guy she’s been crushing on looks her way. “Survivors?” Bonnie breathes out and the words tingle her tongue and fill her with lightness. “Actual other survivors?”

Caroline bobs her head and laughs. “Unless the zombies have started driving.”

The two girls half-run, half-stumble out of the Quik Mart, excitedly tugging on one another’s hands in a race to hit the asphalt pavement and Tennessee sun first. Caroline is faster and stronger, but Bonnie has human enthusiasm and excitement curling in her gut.

“There are people coming,” Matt tells them. He’s grinning from ear-to-ear and it’s contagious. Bonnie grins right back and Caroline bounces on the balls of her feet.

“We know. I heard them inside,” Caroline tells him, and Bonnie can see the tall jock is just eager enough to see other people that the revelation and reminder of Caroline’s undead status barely earns a blink.

“Not too eager, there,” Ric comes around the side of the RV and looks over the happy trio. “We don’t know how could be coming up. Some people might not be too friendly to strangers. Especially now.”

“They’re people. They’re alive!” Caroline is clearly in Peppy Sunshine mode and is not going to let Ric rain on her parade. Bonnie knows that attitude and knows that Ric has already lost the battle. “What could there be to not be friendly about?”

“Plenty.” Damon wanders back into sight. He rakes his gaze over Caroline. “Tone it down, Vampire Barbie and let us do the talking,” He takes a breath and clarifies, “By _us_ I mean me and Ric.”

###

 

Bonnie remembers watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She, Elena and Caroline would gather together on someone's couch -usually Elena's - and with feet tangled and a shared bucket of popcorn, indulge in the tales of the One Girl in All the World and her friends. Not because they thought that vampires were real, but because it was the pop culture of the moment and besides, Angel was hot.

As two pickups and a motorcycle pull to a slow halt at the gas station, it's Buffy's words that ring in the back of her mind. _"My spider sense is tingling."_ Bonnie's spider sense is tingling as well. Maybe it's just the innate fear of anything new and unknown after all the punches Mystic Falls has thrown them; maybe it's leftover paranoia from the no longer there media. Whatever it is, Bonnie instinctively takes a step back towards Matt, giving ground to Damon and Ric to greet the first humans they've seen in weeks.

"Howdy." The first man out of the first pickup isn't very large. His height and build put him somewhere between Damon and Ric, though Bonnie thinks he has a few years on Ric. His clothes say 'working man,' but there's something in his dark eyes and chiseled jaw as his gaze takes their measure that makes Bonnie reach for Caroline's hand. It could be paranoia; it could be the comfortable ease with which a gun of some sort is strapped over his shoulder. "You folks having some vehicle trouble?"

The briefest of glances is exchanged between Damon and Ric. Nothing more than a quick look between friends, but for those who know them, know it's far deeper than that. It's a discussion on multiple levels. A statement for Damon to stand back and watch things while Ric takes the lead. A silent comment that Damon's special brand of tact might stir up more trouble than needed. A warning that Damon's special negotiation skills might make him take over the moment he feels he needs to do so.

"Just gassing up," Ric explains. His stance is casual and open. "Thought we'd look for some road snacks, but looks like someone else got here before we did."

"You'd be right about that," the leader drawls. His hard eyes meet Ric's but only for a moment. His gaze moves beyond them, hungry and measuring, clearly more interested in the two women holding hands behind the former school teacher. "Plenty of people come through here. My boys and I, we make it a point to patrol. Do a little bartering and negotiation. Where would you fine folk be heading?"

"Atlanta, to meet my father," Caroline says, squaring her shoulders.

"South," Ric says at the same time, his words not quite quick enough to overlap Caroline's. He doesn't glance back at the blonde vampire, though there is a tell-tale flinch. Damon, on the other hand, shoots Caroline a dark glare that she shoots right back.

"I wouldn't bother. Waste of time." The man shifts his stance and something about it makes Bonnie's hackles rise. She's not the only one. The witch feels more than sees Matt move closer to her. The tensing of Caroline's shoulders vibrates straight down to the hand holding Bonnie's own. "Atlanta got burned out early on. Nothing there but zombies and desolation."

"We'll take our chances," Damon says. His voice isn't as smooth as Ric's. It's sharp edged and jagged. "We'll just finish our business and pass up the bartering and negotiation."

"I'm afraid that we can't allow that." Just like that, there's a flurry of motion and they're surrounded. Guns held at ready, safetys cocked. Bonnie actually yelps a little, and edges closer to Caroline. It's a warning and a comfort when her friend squeezes her hand and drops it. "See, all this here is our territory. We take ... tithes for passage. Like your RV there. And those pretty little ladies you're traveling with. We'll let you go on, on foot."

"Let me guess: if we don't agree with your terms, you're going to shoot us with your pea shooters and take everything anyway?" Damon challenges. He waits a beat and shakes his head. "No dice. Sorry. Counter offer: you turn, get back in your hillbilly pickup trucks and we let you live."

"Damon - "

"Ric, you know as well as I do that there's only one this ends. I'd rather not spend the next hour having a pissing contest."

The leader looks between the two men. He smiles. Then he guffaws. "Ric? Is that your name? Well, Ric, I'm Emmett and your friend Damon is right. There is only one way this ends. He talks a good game but I don't think any of you can do much against men with guns. Let's not have any trouble. Just give us what we want."

"I'm afraid we can't do that," Ric says. "We don't want any trouble. We'll just go about our way - "

The gun shot sounds like a canon to Bonnie's ears. There's a high pitched wailing scream - later, she'll recall it came from her - and a shocked shout from Matt as Ric goes down with blood spilling from his gut.

"That's a warning," Emmett says.

"No." Damon growls, his face slowly shifting to its vampiric features. "That's your death warrant."

 

###

 

It’s over as quickly as it began. One moment they’re surrounded by men with guns, and Ric is bleeding out on the ground, and the next, there are bodies. Mangled, twisted, broken, bitten bodies. Bodies with heads at grotesque angles, bodies with gaping next wounds and eyes staring sightless toward the sky. Two bodies with gaping holes in their chest cavities.

The air is thick and heavy with the smell of gun fire mingled with the thick coppery tang of blood. Lacing through it all, underneath and on top of it is the scent of other bodily fluids - urine and feces - as in their death throes, the men lost final control of their bodies.

Bonnie stands in the midst of the destruction, bodies on all sides, arms wrapped around her midsection. There is blood on her shirt and blood on her shoes. She can feel the sticky thickness on her face, but can’t raise a hand to wipe it away, just yet.

Peripherally, she’s aware of Matt reeling, stumbling backward until he hits a gas pump and can’t stumble anymore. Then he’s flailing blindly, feet slipping in the muck of human waste as he tries to scamper away and lands on his rear. He doesn’t care, he scoots backward, murmuring about “monsters” and Bonnie isn’t sure if he’s talking about the men who assaulted them - or Caroline and Damon.

A moan and gurgle to her left draw her head. Blood gushes from the heavy-set man’s open throat. He’s choking on it. Bonnie can hear him wheeze and she can see the air bubbles in the blood.

Blink and she can’t see anymore as Damon’s form superimposes itself on the vision of the man. She’s only staring at the vampire’s back, but she can hear the sickening crunch and squish, she can see the ripple of Damon’s shoulder and jerk of his arm.

Bonnie doesn’t look away as the vampire stands and tosses the heart carelessly to the side.

There’s a sound, somewhere between a horrified groan and a soft whimper, and it takes a moment for Bonnie to recognize it as coming from her.

“So not the time to lose it, Bonnie.” Damon is in her space, gazing down at her with eyes as blue and human as they normally are. She’d say there’s no sign of the killing machine that emerged moments ago, but there is blood on his mouth and covering his clothes and his hands. “Go check on Ric. Caroline was giving him blood.”

“I -- “ Bonnie looks away from his gaze to the death and destruction.

The hand on her face should have her recoiling. It’s covered in the blood of these men, literally and figuratively. It’s the hand of a killer, a hand that has ripped hearts out of chests and broken necks as easily as a person can walk or talk. Yet, Damon’s touch is gentle. Firm, as he guides her chin up so that meets his somber blue eyes, but still gentle. “Bonnie. You’re stronger than this. I _need_ you to hold it together.”

He waits, seemingly for her nod of acquiescence and then continues. “Go stay with Ric until he heals. Caroline and I will clean this up.”

Bonnie breathes in and slams the door closed. This is a different sort of horror, but it can’t be dealt with now. A part of her knows that the fate these men had in mind for their group wasn’t a good one.

_This is how the world ends . . ._

“Matt.” It’s the only word Bonnie can get out.

“Go after him.” Ric’s voice comes from behind her and she turns to look. There’s relief and elation, and then everything clicks. The door is slammed shut. Later, she can cry and throw up. Later she can come to terms with what almost happened here today.

“You’re good?” Damon asks. The words are light, but Bonnie can hear the strain in his voice as he looks over at the other man.

“I’m going to live.” He’s close enough to rest a hand on Bonnie’s shoulder and give it a comforting warm squeeze. “Why don’t you go after Matt? I think he really needs a friend now.”

Bonnie doesn’t need to be told twice. Turning away from the gore, she hurries off in the direction that her panicked friend went.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was hard to write, re-write and edit. Action is not my strong suit, so I had to work to get across the menace, the threat and the horrific outcome without spending too much time trying to describe the (brief) 'battle' in gory detail. I hope that I succeeded.


	15. if life is an ocean then i'm only on the surface

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They killed them.” There are words, soft and if she hadn’t been right beside them, Bonnie wouldn’t have heard them at all.
> 
> Bonnie swallows, pushes back thoughts of the carnage. “Those men . . . they wanted to hurt us.” It’s an us or them world, and Bonnie wonders when it became so. When the us were humans and the them were vampires out to kill Elena and destroy her home town, it wasn’t so bad. Now ‘them’ could just as easily be humans.

Bonnie cajoles Matt into moving. She has to cajole him, because her friend is in shock and he’s unresponsive to anything beyond gentle and firmly given orders. It’s orders that get him on his feet, slowly and assuredly, putting one foot in front of the order and _not_ looking back when she tells him not to do so. Bonnie guides him with no clear direction in mind, simply _away_ from the left behind carnage, the blood and the gore unleashed by the fierce and monstrous protection of Damon _and_ Caroline.

Away turns out to be around the building - after a called out warning from Damon to not stray too far. The sound of the vampire’s voice does something to Matt, and he flinches as though he’s been struck. Bonnie tightens her grip on Matt’s arm, and speaks quietly her agreement to be careful. Speaking loudly isn’t required for Damon to hear every word.

The rear of the Quik Mart has a Mom & Pop type car garage. Only two car lifts, and the equipment looks like it could be updated, but also like it possibly did a lot of patch repairs until people could get to the next exit and a real automotive shop. Bonnie slows her gait and then stills as they take in the full rear yard of the Quik Mart. After settling Matt onto the bed of a pickup truck that hasn’t gone anywhere in a long time judging by the rust on the body, and won’t be going anywhere again, she moves slowly toward the garage.

Hand bunched in a fist, her magic is gathering, but a quick and careful look around only reveals a pair of squirrels who scatter at her appearance, and an anthill that she nearly steps into while looking around. Bonnie makes a mental note to tell Damon and Ric about the garage - there may well be something they can salvage and take along just in case they have car trouble - and returns to Matt.

The boy hasn’t moved. He’s hunched over, arms folded across his chest. He barely acknowledges Bonnie when she hops up onto the truck bed beside him and wraps an arm around his shoulder. They both reek of blood and Matt of vomit and gasoline, and Bonnie wrinkles her nose in distaste.

“We’re okay, Matt,” Bonnie tells her friend.

“They killed them.” There are words, soft and if she hadn’t been right beside them, Bonnie wouldn’t have heard them at all.

Bonnie swallows, pushes back thoughts of the carnage. “Those men . . . they wanted to hurt us.” It’s an us or them world, and Bonnie wonders when it became so. When the _us_ were humans and the _them_ were vampires out to kill Elena and destroy her home town, it wasn’t so bad. Now _‘them’_ could just as easily be humans.

Matt doesn’t answer, and Bonnie thinks that maybe it’s better that he’s slipped back into shock. Now’s not the time to discuss the shades of gray and flexible morality that this new world has thrust at them.

Glancing around, she sees something new. Promising Matt that she’ll return, Bonnie slips off to double check that’s she’s seeing an outdoor shower. One that works, through she hears the pipes knocking a bit when she first turns it on. The water is cold, but it’s the middle of July and it won’t take long to warm up. With more cajoling, she leads Matt back to the shower. Once upon a time this situation would have been _odd_ and _awkward_ but now it’s natural. Reaching up to slosh the water through Matt’s hair. Pumping out the liquid soap and soaping his hair, encouraging him to peel off the bloodied shirt and dumping the soap into his hands.

He washes himself with direction from her, and when Bonnie thinks she can leave him alone, she ventures away to find towels or something. Unsurprisingly, there are some thin blankets in a cabinet near the shower. They’re musty and dusty, and smell as much like stale metal and old air, but they will do for their needs.

Matt’s under the spray in his boxers, his eyes closed and his hands still rubbing at skin as though he can wash the day’s events away. Though she feels her face heat a little, Bonnie doesn’t focus on her friend’s partial nudity. Again, it’s with cajoling and suggestion that she coaxes Matt from the spray and gets him to sit on a lawn chair that’s far more sturdy than it looks. He looks like a lost little boy, with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his head cast down. But he’s a clean lost little boy and she feels like she accomplished _something._

Bonnie takes her turn next. Toes off her shoes before stepping under the spray, though it’s a bit late. She debates a heartbeat or two before deliberately yanking her shirt over her head. It’s ruined with blood and gore and no matter of washing will get it clean again. Bonnie won’t be wearing it anymore. Nor the khaki shorts that she peels down her legs, kicking the clothes away from her feet. Standing beneath the shower in just her bra and panties, modesty and shyness don’t have a place when she just wants to wash the gore away. Only a small part is worried about Ric or Damon coming around the corner.

_Ric won’t look and Damon . . . Damon’s a pig, anyway._

Bonnie closes her eyes and lets the water wash away the taint that she can feel and smell clinging to her. She lathers soap over her body slowly, rubbing hard at the places where the blood seeped through and stained her skin.

“Shower!” Caroline’s voice bubbles over the sound of the water.

Peeling her eyes open, Bonnie watches as her friend bounds across the yard, slowing as she approaches Matt.

“Caroline, don’t.” Bonnie speaks softly. “Give him some space.” She barely hears her own words over the spray, but Caroline halts with a conflicted look on her face. After a beat, the vampire changes her direction and gives Matt wide berth in her quest for water and cleanliness.

 

###

 

“How is Fred?”

Bonnie ventures a glance over her shoulder at Damon. The blue eyed devil inclines his head toward Matt and repeats the question. “How is Fred?”

“He’s in shock.” Whirling to face him, Bonnie keeps her arms folded over her covered breasts. Water drips into her face from her bangs and she blinks droplets out of her eyes, feeling just this side of _embarrassed_ to be standing there dripping wet in her undergarments in front of Damon. She lowers her voice, for Matt’s sake, but her voice still carries steel within it. “He just saw you and Caroline go all Natural Born Killers, how do you think he is?”

Damon toes off his boots and rolls his eyes. “He needs to get over it.”

“That may be fine for you. But some of us are human and we don’t deal with death and destruction like it’s - “ Bonnie searches for a word and forgetting her modesty, waves a hand in Damon’s direction. “A walk in the park. He needs time to deal with this.”

“No, he needs. To. Get. Over. It.” Damon states each word succinctly, unbuttoning his shirt as he does. He draws it from his body and looks at it with noted annoyance. “This was Versace. If this keeps up, I’m going to be wearing Wal-Mart.”

“Poor you.” Bonnie pushes her wet bangs from her face. It’s almost comical that Damon is worrying about his _designer_ shirt in lieu of everything else. Designer clothes, like the rest of the world that’s slipping away from them, are a thing of the past.

“I’m sure I’ll be able to steal another one eventually,” Damon says dismissively. He balls the shirt up and tosses it toward the pile of discarded clothes, and Bonnie very pointedly looks away from the subtle play of muscles and the fact that his jeans are hanging entirely too low on his hips. Because while she can admit that Damon is a toxic poison in a candy coated wrapper, she has no intention of admiring him or letting him know it.

The witch is half-afraid he’s going to join her in the shower - and while she was comfortable caring for Matt, and sharing the shower with Caroline - having Damon wash off beside her is just that final level of _weird_ and _uncomfortable_ that Bonnie is pretty certain her brain can’t handle right now.

Fortunately, he turns and approaches Matt, and before Bonnie can take two full steps forward, the blonde young man is jerking his attention up to Damon. Then Damon’s clapping him on the shoulder, helping him to his feet and Matt is wandering off toward the corner of the building.

“What. Did. You. Do?” Bonnie hisses. Again the words are low, but Damon hears them.

He saunters back toward her without a care in the world. “He was useless. I made him better.”

“What is wrong with you?” Bonnie reaches out and shoves him. Not magically, but physically. He’s as immovable as a stone, which makes her _want_ to magically toss him across the garage yard, except that she’s conserving her strength. “You can’t just compel people _out_ of shock!”

“I just did.” Her hands rise to shove him again and Damon catches them. Not hard, but firmly. “You’re much better when you do that magically. Then I can’t fight back.” He steps toward her and Bonnie instinctively backs up a step. A smirk turns Damon’s mouth up and he takes another step, with Bonnie backing up until she startles from the cold spray at her back again. That makes her step forward, putting her far closer to Damon than she’s comfortable. The witch wants to break away and back off, but the smirk on Damon’s face makes her hold her ground.

“Is that what you did to me?” Bonnie thinks that she’s compartmentalizing. She’s putting it all aside to deal with later, but she remembers Damon telling her to be strong.

“I didn’t have to.” Damon reaches around her and adjusts the spray so that it’s beating down on both of them. “You’re stronger than that. You’re a _Bennett witch.”_ Eyes as pale as the sky overhead meet hers. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Off her eye roll, he continues. “Relax, Judgy. I didn’t reprogram the little football player. I just told him to sleep it off and things won’t look so bad when he wakes up. His free will is all there for him to freak out to his heart’s content. Later.”

Then Damon’s hands land on her waist and Bonnie doesn’t know if she’s more startled by the _warmth_ of them or by his audacity. Before she can hit him with a good aneurysm, he lifts her and bodily moves her back a step. “You’re hogging all the water.”

It clicks. She’s standing there in her underwear, talking to Damon. It clicks and hits her and Bonnie just freezes as she tries to decide whether she’s embarrassed, annoyed, or somewhere in between.

 _Surreal_ is the word that pops to mind, and it sticks better than anything else. There is no other way to describe this moment, as reality catches up and comes crashing down on her. As Damon closes his eyes and tilts his head back under the spray, and her eyes betray her by watching the rivulets of water stream over his torso before Bonnie rips her gaze away.

“I’m done.” The words are sharper and louder than she intends, her heart beating furiously in her chest. Bonnie skirts around him and walks directly toward one of the extra blankets.

“I heard there - whoa.” Ric rounds the corner and Bonnie wonders if this can get any more uncomfortable.

_I don’t want to know._

Now, she feels the heat in her face, to go with the out of control beating heart and the fact that her breathing is off-kilter. Bonnie snatches up the blanket and wraps it around her like a shower towel before giving a covert glance at Ric. Thankfully, the older man is pointedly gazing upwards.

“I heard there was a shower,” Ric says and his face is spiraling through various shades of red. Which almost, _almost_ makes Bonnie feel better.

“It’s all yours.” Bonnie hugs the towel closed. “But you’ll have to share with Damon.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Damon calls out. “You didn’t mind.”

Bonnie refuses to look back at the vampire. She does look over at Ric, “It’s not what it sounds like.”

“With Damon, it never is,” Ric says.

The witch is halfway to the corner of the building when Damon calls out, “Hey Bonnie?”

She stops - and she knows she will likely regret it later, but she stops because he used her name. Not one of those annoying nicknames, but her name. Glances back at the vampire - now stripping down to his underpants - _and yes, I already regret it._

“You’ve been holding out. Who knew you were built like -”

“Is now really the time to be a lecherous old man, Damon?” Ric scolds him, saving him from the steaming hot shower Bonnie was preparing to deliver.

“Is there ever a _good_ time?”

Taking a deep breath, Bonnie walks faster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter posted before Nanowrimo next month. I'm hoping to get one more chapter in before the madness of November and the holiday season, but I'm making no promises. I'm grateful to everyone who is following this story and giving me reasons to continue it. 
> 
> As I stated in the beginning, this story is mostly finished as it was my Nanowrimo project so many years ago. I've been editing and re-writing as time and life permit, and again, I'm happy that other people are enjoying reading as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> It's not very far out now that the story will come to its ultimate conclusion as originally written for Nanowrimo, but I won't be stopping there. Once the story reaches it's original scripted ending, that's when the story really starts. There's still a lot more story to tell and things to explore, and I've already started pushing ahead beyond my original wrap up, so rest assured, the story has a lot of life left in it yet.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Atlanta isn't what they expect, and the group grows by two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter begins to weave OCs into the story.
> 
> You can see them here: [Guest Cast](http://fiction-notions.tumblr.com/post/134559193490/guest-starring)

Atlanta is not the welcoming Mecca that they hoped it would be. There are no greeters at the span of highway that spills into the city, no roadside booths and soldiers standing sentry. No ticker tape parade or waving banners and flags that declare ‘You’re safe now.’ Instead blowing papers and the remnants of what might once have been litter the road. A single shoe here, a shirt there. Road barricade signs that once served some purpose now lie on their sides or are pushed to the curbs of the streets. The remnants of signage hang from them - some of them covered in splatters of things that are old and dry, dark red faded to brown. Sandbags pile high, some with bodies lying where they fell. Flies twitch around them and a few of the bodies twitch in vain and desperate attempts to actually move, but have little luck.

Nearby, a tank stands like a deserted behemoth watching over what might have once needed protecting. The burned out shells of cars litter the road, some flipped onto their sides, part of the now fallen last wall of defense.

Damon sucks in a breath of air and blows it out in a long sigh from where he and the others sit on top of the RV. “Something tells me that Atlanta has fallen.”

“But ... Bonnie’s spell . . . “ Caroline stares wide-eyed at what is clearly a dead city. “It said my father was here.”

“Do you have any idea how large Atlanta is, Blondie?” Damon challenges from his perch. “There could be survivors anywhere in there. Finding them? That’s going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. A haystack full of hungry zombies.”

Bonnie reaches out a hand and rubs Caroline’s shoulder. “I can do another spell, maybe. If we can find a map of Atlanta, I can maybe narrow it down.”

Damon peers at the witch, his brow wrinkling. “That’s a lot of _maybe_ there, Glinda.”

Of course, she continues talking like he hasn’t said a word. “There were maps back at that last rest stop. I can do the spell tonight.”

“Or. You can wait.” Damon waits until the witch turns her gaze to his, and Caroline and Ric do as well. “We’ve been pushing toward Atlanta because it was supposed to be a safe zone. Maybe it was once, but it sure as hell isn’t now. Even with a location spell, who knows what we’ll find in there? We need a better plan than Operation Find Daddy Warbucks.”

Peripherally, Damon is aware of the look of petulance on Caroline’s face and the exasperation on Ric’s but his gaze is locked to Bonnie’s in a not-quite-so-silent challenge. “Go ahead, witchy migraine me, or throw me into that pile of zombie bits on the sandbags, but you know I’m right. You all know that I’m right.”

“It really is the end of the world,” Ric sighs. “When Damon is the voice of reason.” He glances back toward the not barricaded city that Damon has noticed that he’s been avoiding looking at. “We need a plan before we go in there. I’m not saying your spell won’t be useful, but we need something to fall back on, and we all need to be at one hundred percent.”

There’s no need for further explanation. Everyone knows that Ric is talking about the jock, who’s still sleeping off his shock per Damon’s compulsion from earlier. No one else has cracked yet, and Damon’s been watching Ric and Bonnie closely. Caroline flipped that Peppy Cheerleader switch that only she possesses, the one that goes from fanged monster to insufferable perkiness in the blink of an eye, as she tries so desperately to pretend that she’s still just a normal girl. The former teacher and the witch are brittle and frayed around the edges, but they’re good soldiers and they will pick themselves up and put themselves back together even if they break.

At least Damon hopes that they will.

He’d never admit aloud that he might actually be worried about them. Ric was shot, as close to death he can get because a gunshot from a bunch of hillbilly and redneck punks isn’t supernatural. He didn’t see the whirling dervish of destruction in action, only the aftermath - and somehow he still helped with cleanup.

Bonnie should have cracked and broken into a million pieces. She was on the verge of it, but Damon played on her hero/martyr complex. The _need_ to have her hold it together, and then she had Matt to worry about. After that, when she was dressed in a pair of cut off sweats and a t-shirt that is two sizes too large for her, he kept up a steady stream of witch-baiting all the way toward Atlanta.

_Whatever works._

They all need to hold it together. Solidarity and they’re a team. As much as Damon is loathe to admit it - somewhere along the way he’s become a team player.

And it happened before the dead started walking.

“We have radios,” Damon reminds them. “We can try to raise someone on them.”

“What makes you think they have radios?” Caroline asks.

“Because it’s the smart way to communicate.” Damon waves an arm toward the city scape of Atlanta. “When the sun sets, how many lights do you think we’ll see? The power is starting to fade. Cell phones won’t charge forever, no matter how long the towers stand and the satellites are in orbit. Anyone smart is going to fall back on the old and reliable.”

“But we don’t do this tonight,” Ric drags his gaze away from the city. His eyes land on Damon’s. “We all need a night to regroup.”

If the man is expecting an argument, he’s not going to get one from Damon. It’ll be a hell of a lot easier going in if he doesn’t have to worry _too much_ about them and watching their backs. “Well, I’m going to vote for camping as far from the bleak vista and the possibility of zombies.”

Standing, Damon walks to the ladder that leads to the top of the RV. “It’s getting late though and traveling by night is just plain stupid. I’m pretty sure we passed a rest stop back ten or so miles.” He pauses and tosses a glance at Bonnie, “We’ll swing by the rest stop and get a map, too.”

The solid sole of Damon’s boot has barely touched the ground when he hears it. His head swivels toward the desolate city of Atlanta, concentration zeroing in.

Caroline drops to the ground beside him with the agility and stealth of a cat. She flexes her knees, two digits touching the ground before she straightens to a standing position. Damon’s gaze flickers appreciatively in her direction. It’s always a good thing when a vampire embraces _being a vampire._ How many years did he spend trying to convince Stefan that their gifts aren’t to be ignored? Caroline won’t see it that way, but Damon is always willing to encourage. She’s young and some day she might see the error of her ways and assumptions.

“You hear it?” Caroline asks.

Damon gives a quick, sharp nod.

“What do we hear?” Ric is the next one down, though he’s using the ladder as a nod to and acknowledgement of the fact that he _isn’t_ a supernatural creature with super healing.

“Motorcycles,” Caroline answers. “Coming _from_ Atlanta.”

“That’s a good sign,” Bonnie’s head peeks over the top of the RV. “That means someone is alive in there.”

“No, it means that someone is _running_ from whatever is in there,” Damon corrects. His attention is only half on the witch and his other companions. He’s focusing on the roaring of those engines, gauging speed and distance. They’re not _that_ far way. Not nearly enough time to get the RV turned around, to get both vehicles on the road and out distance the riders.

“How many?” Ric asks.

“We should get out of here.” Bonnie is coming down the ladder, but she’s moving too quickly. Damon sees the inevitable before it happens. The slide of the slick sole of her sneaker against the rug, the slip of the foot and panicked grab of the hand onto the ladder.

The vampire barely looks toward the witch as he’s in place, catching her beneath the armpits and easily - and swiftly - swinging her down to the ground. “No time. And thank me later,” Damon says right before answering Ric. “Only two but that’s more than enough. You and Bonnie need to get in the RV.”

Ric shakes his head, “Damon -”

“Ric. Take Bonnie and get in the RV.” Damon isn’t leaving room for argument. He hasn’t forgotten the events of earlier. “I’ve already seen you almost die for good once today. That’s more than enough for me.”

For a long moment, Ric holds his gaze in a silent challenge. Then, just when Damon thinks the other man _won’t_ back down, he nods and ushers Bonnie toward the RV. “Be careful,” Ric tells them.

“Just get down. Stay out of sight.”

“What are we doing?” Caroline asks as the door to the RV closes and an audible click sounds.

“Hoping that whomever or whatever it is passes us by.” Damon slips around to the other side of the RV and then over to the Hummer. Caroline is right on his heels, crouching down beside him.

“Why don’t we just leave?”

“Because leaving means they’ll run into us on the road. This way, we have the advantage.” Damon slides to the ground and rolls under the Hummer. There is a faint chance that he might be spotted, but if so, he’s counting on the motorcycle riders thinking that he’s a corpse.

_And they would be so right. Just not the right kind of corpse._

Sometimes maudlin humor is all he has.

From this vantage he can also see the motorcycles as they approach. And they’re a lot closer now.

Less than three minutes later, Damon can see the wheels of the bikes, and he sees the rear bike swerve to avoid the reaching hand of a zombie. It’s a bad judgement call. The bike hits a slick patch and goes spinning out of control, flipping into the air and tossing the rider as it does.

Bike and rider land about ten feet apart, and while the front wheel of the motorcycle continues to spin idly for a few moments, the rider doesn’t move. Either stunned or dead; Damon doesn’t know and doesn’t care enough to find out.

The second bike slows, sweeping around in an arc. It stutters a moment then picks up momentum again in its change of direction, rider hunched low over the steering bars and heading back toward his fallen comrade.

Damon’s ready to slip away when he hears them. The familiar shuffling gait and half-tromping steps. Feet that drag on broken and twisted legs. Bodies that are falling apart and don’t realize it. Corpses that aren’t nearly as pretty as he is, or as cool, who don’t know that it’s time to lie down and die. They’re still some distance away, but there are enough of them that Damon knows they’re moving in a large pack.

He’s pretty certain he knows what - or rather - whom they were following. It explains why the riders were beating a hasty retreat out of the shell of Atlanta.

He also realizes that he’s not the only one who’s heard the zombie hoard approaching. Caroline rushes from her spot, reaching the rider on the ground as his riding partner does.

“Caroline!” Damon hisses from his spot beneath the car. He smacks his hand against the pavement with a growled, “Dammit!”

He hears the prone rider groan, sees the body shift faintly.

“I think he’s just stunned,” Caroline says to the second rider.

“How do you know? Where did you come from?” The second rider’s voice isn’t deep. It’s not the bass of a man, but the timbre of a female.

Caroline glances back at Damon then at the woman. “He’s moving. We should get him up.”

“Who are you?” The second rider demands.

“Does it matter?” Caroline gives her a steady, unflinching look. “We’re here to help you.”

Damon rolls from beneath the car and is halfway to the bike, stopping to glance back at the city. _They’re_ getting closer.

“I’ll check the bike,” Damon calls out to Caroline, his voice startling the other girl. He leaves the girl to Caroline. He continues on to fallen motorcycle. A quick check reveals the front wheel is bent and there’s no way the thing is going to be properly steered again without some serious work by a trained mechanic.

_And guess what? We’re fresh out of those._

By the time Damon turns back to Caroline and the other rider, the prone one has been lifted to his feet and is shaking off the shock of his fall. “The bike is useless. He’s lucky to be walking.”

“We still have one bike,” comes from the fallen rider. “We can take it.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Caroline glances back toward Atlanta. “They’re coming. You should come with us.”

Damon stares at the other vampire. He wants to scream at her, he wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth rattle, but there’s no time for that.

“We don’t even know you,” the female rider protests.

“Yeah, well, we don’t know you either.” Damon pats down the male rider, removing his pistol despite the man’s attempt to stop him and grab it back. “Sorry, my Barbie Blonde friend here might be all rescue rangers, but I’m not feeling that generous and trustworthy.” Damon tucks the pistol into the back of his pants.

He waves toward the other bike, his blue eyes peering into the face plate of the female rider. “Can you ride that? Your friend can -”

“Ride with her.”

“Whatever,” Damon shrugs. He gives the man a hard glare. “You’re not getting the gun back though.”

###

There are a lot of stars in the sky tonight.

Damon stretches out on his back, hands tucked behind his head, staring up at the clear sky. The stars twinkle merrily as they always have. Millions and billions of light years away with no idea that the light is reaching a much changed world. A world with only a scant handful of the population that it had only months ago.

It’s depressing actually and Damon isn’t the type to get maudlin and depressed over things like twinkling stars and a decimated human population. Except for the lack of food part.

“I know that it’s not your usual poison, but it’s the best I could find on short notice.”

Damon rolls his head so that his eyes turn to Alaric who is settling on the ground beside him. Before he can ask, the other man puts a six-pack of bottled beer between them. Damon’s eyes go wide and he scrambles to a sitting position, snatching up one of the bottles.

“Ric, I could kiss you.”

“Please don’t. I think the world’s gone crazy enough. I'm at my limit of life altering events I can deal with right now,” Ric grins.

“Where did you find this?” Damon uses the hem of his shirt and pops the cap on one bottle, handing it to Ric and then retrieving one for himself.

“Look around. Where are we?” Ric waves an arm indicating the deserted campers and RVs and tents here at the campsite where they’ve made nightfall. “One thing you’re always going to find at campsites are a few drunken bonfires and your share of rednecks. Which means beer.”

“I never thought I would say this,” Damon taps his bottle against Ric’s. “I love rednecks.”

Ric chuckles and tilts the bottle back to take a drink. He looks up to the top of the RV, and back to Damon. “That was a good choice, giving Jake his gun back.”

“The jury is still out,” Damon shakes his head. He follows Ric’s gaze to the lone figure sitting atop of the RV, a pair of night vision binoculars around his neck and his eyes gazing over the tops of the trees into the still night. The pair of motorcyclists that they picked up - Jake and Cassie - are camped with them tonight, no thanks to Caroline's - then Bonnie’s and Ric’s - bleeding hearts.

“They’re _kids_ , Damon,” Ric points out. “Just two lost kids trying to make their way. I think it’s lucky that we ran into them. Haven’t we been saying safety in numbers?”

“Large numbers,” Damon points out. “Right now, we’ve got two military brats that Caroline and I have to be careful around.” He takes several long swallows from the bottle of beer. “We’re just lucky that they’re not on vervaine.”

Ric narrows his eyes at Damon, pointing at him with the neck of the bottle. “You’ll behave yourself Damon.”

“Jesus, Ric.” Damon rolls his eyes and makes a disgusted snort. “I’m not going to _eat_ them. We’re not that desperate yet.” He takes another pull from the bottle, tilting his head to listen to the banter and inane babble of the girls inside the RV as they make nice with Cassie. “But, if they do see something and have a freak out like Matt, I’d like to be able to _handle_ it with a little compulsion and no attitude. The last thing we need is someone playing hero and thinking they can stake me or Caroline while we’re asleep.”

“Nice to know that you sometimes worry about Caroline too.”

“Don’t make a big deal about it. She’s just part of our dysfunctional survival group.”

Ric gives him a look of complete disbelief and Damon pretends not to notice. “Whatever you say, Damon.”

“Besides,” Damon finishes off the first bottle of beer and opens another one. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Atlanta and she’ll be reunited with Daddy and all will be well.” He frowns at the beer, “There is more where this came from, right? I mean, should we be savoring it or something?”

“There’s more,” Ric nods with a laugh. He takes a long drink and heaves a sigh. “About Atlanta . . . I think we should wait a day or two.”

Damon frowns at his friend, his brow wrinkling enough to make Stefan’s jealous, he’s sure. “Why? What happened to finding survivors as quickly as possible?”

Ric holds the beer to his temple and sighs again. “I think . . . they’re kids, Damon. They need some downtime. Some time to recover. The shock of what happened earlier today hasn’t really set in. Matt’s only functioning because you compelled him, and Bonnie’s going to break eventually.” He turns and gazes off into the trees, the noises of the night singing a soft song in the background. A peaceful contrast to the world that’s really out there now. “They need to recuperate. We all do. And if what Jake and Cassie told us about Atlanta is true, it’s not going to be easy getting to Caroline’s father even if Bonnie can find him with a spell.”

Ric pats the ground beside him. “This place is as good a place to stop and gather our wits about us as anywhere else.”

“How long?” Damon asks after a pregnant pause in the conversation.

“A day, maybe two. Just give them . . . give all of us sometime.”

Damon tilts his head back to stare at the stars again. “We don’t have to share the beer do we?”

Ric laughs. “No, the beer is our secret.”

“Fine, as long as I have beer. We can stay. The beer dries up and we move on.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“I have priorities.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope this chapter was worth the wait.


	17. end of the night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are worse things than zombies out there.

The evening of the third day, Damon is restless and bored and Ric knows that might not be a good sign. He watches the vampire prowl the deserted campers and tents, sneaking stealthily away with bodies - and body parts - starting to rot that they hadn’t yet had the nerve or the will to touch. Somewhere out in those woods, Damon is burying them, and Caroline moving like a quiet wraith behind him, helping - or more often, scrunching up her nose and making tiny little ‘eww’ sounds as she slides on the rubber gloves she found somewhere and sets about picking through the remnants of family vacation and bachelor weekends destroyed by the end of world.

Sometimes Bonnie and Matt help her, sometimes Cassie too, when her dark red head isn’t joined close to Jake’s while they talk quietly together. Ric doesn’t need supernatural hearing to know that they’re debating the merits of sitting still and staying with this strange band of small-towners who they really don’t know and have no reason to trust. To her credit, Cassie tries and she’s built something of a rapport with Bonnie and Caroline; the older girl - she just finished up her junior year in college, and that does make her so much older and wiser, at least in certain aspects of the world - taking up something of a ‘big sister’ role to the two girls who will never officially be high school seniors anymore than Cassie will have the college ranking.

Jake, however, is as wary and distrustful as Damon on a good day. It makes for tensions and hard looks, raised voices and plenty of interjections and distractions. Ric has jokes and sets Damon on the road to cleaning the campers and tents, just to keep the vampire occupied and to stop him from doing something stupid. Sometimes Caroline hisses at him, her eyes going black and the spider-web of veins showing when Jake and Cassie aren’t looking; it doesn’t threaten Damon, always seems to amuse him, but it helps the mood pass.

There’s a time on their second day where voices are raised, Jake and Damon standing toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye over the distribution of a few found firearms. Jake’s military all the way, was going to finish out at the Air Force Academy like his old man and his old man before him. Damon thinks he’s young and green and _stupid_ for wanting to concentrate on guns that _make noise_ and attract the zombie walkers, and watching the escalation Ric worries and wonders how Jake and Cassie can stay in Damon’s presence and not know that they’re dealing with a deadly predator.

Bonnie intervenes that day, giving Damon a two or three second migraine before he stops wincing - and Ric assumes she lets up - and then he’s storming off into the trees. His speed is human, but Ric knows once he’s gone beyond view, he’ll do that vampire speed thing he does and they’ll not see Damon for hours.

 _It’s probably better,_ Ric thinks, though he worries about Damon in the interim.

He worries even more when he realizes that Bonnie is gone, and that Matt and Cassie can’t tell him how long she’s been gone. Jake from his treetop perch - because there must be something in the boy’s blood about heights and aerial views after all - didn’t see her leave and Caroline’s been too busy playing happy camper homemaker to have missed her friend yet.

Jake wants to scour for zombies, Caroline snaps at him for the implication and then at Matt too when he suggests that maybe Bonnie just wandered off. Ric and Caroline are ready to go off looking for her when she just walks into the middle of their heated argument, giving her ponytail a tug and delivering a quiet no-nonsense, “I was fine all along.”

It’s a declaration and not open for argument. It's one of those moments of steely backbone that Ric has only seen when Bonnie is her element, dealing with the supernatural and being the strong witch that she can be.

The fact that she has returned with Damon in tow, and that the two go to opposite ends of the camp without speaking gets raised brows and confused looks. Later, when he and Damon are scouting and come across a scorched, split tree, Ric stops and stares and still gets no answer.

He brings Damon back later, when the sun is setting - and it’s risky and stupid, but yeah, so was living in Mystic Falls and hunting _vampires_ and trying to stop _Originals._ There’s beer shared between them and Ric indicates the tree with the tilt of the bottle. “Your work?”

“I don’t burn trees with the power of my mind, Ric.” It’s bored, detached; Damon is propped up against a different tree, drinking from his own bottle.

“You punch them.”

“I was frustrated.” Damon sucks down the beer, those blue eyes eerily cool and pale in the light of the setting sun. “It got in my way.”

“We have to work together. You get that right?” Ric leans back against a fallen log. The night noises are comforting all around them. It’s the absence of night noises that gets their guard up.

“Witchy gave me the lecture, spare me.” Damon rolls his eyes, finishes off the bottle. The sound of glass splintering reverberates through the night as the bottle smashes against a far tree.

Ric winces, “That was loud.”

Damon actually looks sheepish, and his eyes squint up at the corners. “Yeah. My bad.” He grabs another beer from the case and opens it, downing a few swallows as Ric laughs, and he gives the other man a sober look. “You need to keep a better eye on your charges. Bonnie should not have been wandering out here by herself. I was . . . _in a mood. “_

“You didn’t hurt her.” It’s not a question. “You wouldn’t hurt her.” Also, not a question. There was a time when that might have been a concern, but despite his attitude and asshole-behavior, the only person Damon is in danger of hurting is Jake, and Ric thinks it showed remarkable restraint that Damon walked away. Of course, that might have had to do with the magical aneurysm.

Damon doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to really. Ric wants to ask _what_ happened out here, really wants to know what words were exchanged between Bonnie and Damon, and if it was more than words. Bonnie has a penchant for tossing magical blows and Damon likes to provoke people. It’s not a good idea for the witch to set herself up as Damon’s distraction when the vampire is in a bad mood because one of these days she might not be able to take him and Ric isn't always sure that Damon knows where to draw the line.

“Don’t screw with her, Damon.”

“What if she screws with me?” There’s that lopsided, smarmy smile and Ric knows that the conversation is already over long before it begins.

“Something tells me you were lucky she focused on the tree.” He makes a promise to talk to Bonnie later, and he wishes he could say that he’s surprised that she’s as taciturn and evasive as Damon.

“I did what you told me to do,” Bonnie looks up from sorting cans of beans and vegetables, and Ric tries not to frown as he tries not to think about how long it will be before he gets really tired of eating beans with the occasional side of spam or tuna fish. “I’m calling him on his shit.”

“You chased him down when he was pissed off, Bonnie.” The words are curious, half-accusatory. “You know how Damon gets when he’s pissed off.”

“We need him. We need everyone, but we need him too.” A loose shrug of her shoulders, Bonnie stacks a can of spam on top of the beans. A month ago there would have been complaints and frowns at that sight, but she knows that food is a thing to be prized, whatever the type. “I can handle Damon.”

 _For how long?_ Ric wants to ask but doesn’t. Bonnie’s strength is in her magic, and he’s been around her long enough to know that that well gets tapped sometimes and she needs to recover. “What happened out there, Bonnie?”

She flips her ponytail over her shoulder. Ducks down and digs into the cupboard and produces a box of crackers. “I told him to stop being a dick and be a team player.” She bites a cracker, pulls a face, grabs a paper towel and spits it out because even at the end of the world, it still seems like there needs to be etiquette and decorum. “Stale.”

Still the teen witch doesn’t discard them. Every bit of food counts.

“Don’t wear yourself out.” Ric gives her shoulder a squeeze, waits until she meets his gaze and he knows that she’s _listening_ to him and not just hearing the words.

Her smile is tired, wavers. There’s a sigh and a nod. “I’ll save it for the zombies.”

He wonders if she’s already tired, but suspects she’ll deny it and as long as they’re staying put she has the time to recuperate. “It might not be as satisfying as smacking Damon around, but it’ll be a lot more helpful in the long run.”

The witch’s eyes go comically wide at Ric’s assessment, and she ducks her head almost immediately, digging into the cupboard this camper trailer again. It makes him really want to ask what went on out there when Bonnie confronted Damon, but a small part of him doesn’t want to know. He’s somehow become guardian and mentor, and he’s Damon’s friend as well and he really doesn’t want to even allow his imagination to go there.

Never mind that it makes sense: Elena was the glue that made them cooperate, she was the force that held them together. Her loss is the one one thing that Bonnie and Damon have in common, and there’s so many ways that fine edge of animosity could be honed between the pair of them. Ric isn’t sure that it would be healthy or wise, or even safe to have the hair trigger vampire and hair trigger witch on any kind of playing field of that sort.

“We should go to Atlanta tomorrow,” Ric announces without preamble the third night when they’re all gathered around for dinner. One of the campers had fish, properly stored and chilled, still good enough to eat. Matt, Jake and Cassie cleaned it, and then Jake taught anyone who wanted to know how to cook it up over a low campfire. They’re all gathered around in camping chairs, except Damon who always has to be different, and is stretched out on the ground a few feet away. The vampire’s eyes are closed, and he’s unnaturally still. He looks to all the world like he’s sleeping and not paying any attention to what’s going on, but Ric knows better.

“Why tomorrow?” Jake asks. His dark eyes are filled with their usual suspicion and his voice is gruff, and Ric wonders what could have happened to the kid earlier in life to make him so jaded. Even his kids - and yes, Ric has taken on that role of guardian and protector, and he does think of them as his on some level - don’t have that same level of skepticism, distrust and jadedness.

_And they’ve been to hell and back and had their worlds turned inside out in the last year. We all have._

“I think we need to get moving,” Ric says. He pokes at the fire with his stick. “We’ve been sitting here for a few days, and we’re all getting a little restless.” He pretends to not notice the way more than one set of eyes flickers toward Damon.

“We were having a hard time finding survivors.” Cassie pulls her legs up on her chair. She toys with a long red braid, wrapped in yarn and ribbon and dyed an awful purple color, but really, that’s the least of things to complain about and it’s none of Ric’s concern.

“But you said you heard someone on the radio?” Matt prompts. He lets Caroline sit close to him now, though he still sometimes edges away from physical contact. It’s enough for Caroline and she’s happy to drag her chair as far into his space as he’ll allow and clean out and inventory supplies side-by-side.

“Assuming it wasn't just random feedback or a few of the walkers playing hackey sack,” Jake comments. He pulls the bill of his baseball cap down tight on his head and looks briefly out past the fire, into the trees beyond as though he could see the zombies coming under cover of night if he tries hard enough.

Caroline sits up straighter. “My dad is there.” Her gaze slips to Bonnie, for reassurance and then back to the group as a whole. “I _know_ he is.”

Jake peers at her from across the fire. “How do you know that?” He looks around at the group, temporarily ignoring Caroline’s look of protest, before settling back on her. “Look, _a lot_ of people headed to Atlanta because it was supposed to be some sort of Mecca. Well, you saw it. Whatever happened, Mecca or no Mecca, Atlanta fell - “

“Not the first time,” Damon remarks idly from where he’s stretched out. “At least this time it isn’t burning.”

“How is that helpful?” Bonnie looks over her shoulder at the vampire.

“It isn’t,” Damon admits, sitting up with a shrug. “I’m just keeping things in perspective. Atlanta is a wasteland, and Fort Briggs fell -”

“You don’t believe us?” Jake asks. He straightens in his seat, brown eyes hard as they clash with the haunting pale blue ones. “We were lucky to get out of there when they started trying to lock down, and the place was overrun with zombies. It’s probably the same thing that happened in Atlanta. All it takes is one getting through the gates and all hell breaks loose.”

“Don’t get so defensive there Sarge,” Damon pushes up off the ground, with far too much grace for someone human and breaks his self-imposed separation to settle on the ground between Ric’s and Bonnie’s and chairs. “I was actually agreeing with you, unless you missed that part.” He tosses a rock at the fire, tilts his head as though listening to it crackle and continues, “But we have good reason to think that there may be people in Atlanta a few days ago. We’re not going in gung-ho and not with guns blazing.”

Damon pins Jake with his gaze, and unlike so many people are prone to do, the Air Force cadet does not back down or waver under that too intense, sometimes not quite human stare. “Isn’t that what got you two in trouble to begin with?”

“We were defending ourselves,” Jake points out. “Zombies got the drop on us and we had to get moving -”

“Shut up.” The word is quick and sharp, Damon holding a hand up and a finger to his lips in the universal signal of ‘be quiet.’

Despite the rudeness and Jake’s dislike of Damon, there is something in Damon’s behavior that must speak to the military part of the younger man. Jake instantly straightens up, half standing and peering into the trees though there is nothing to see.

Matt looks around, his voice low. “Is there -”

“Shut. Up.” Damon repeats. His eyes lock with Caroline’s over the fire and then both vampires are on their feet. Ric thinks that if Jake and Cassie weren’t straining their attention into the uninterrupted darkness that they might blink at how quickly the pair moves. Ric, Bonnie and Matt are on their feet in short order, though exchanging glances with the other two, Ric knows that Bonnie and Matt don’t expect to hear whatever it is that Damon and Caroline heard, no more than Ric does.

Jake slowly draws his gun from the holster he wears at his hip, and out of the corner of his eye, Ric sees Cassie doing the same. Damon doesn’t care enough to snipe at them about it, and Ric knows why. If there are zombie walkers coming, then once they’re here, the gunfire isn’t going to matter.

“I don’t hear them,” Jake comments. His voice is quiet, barely audible. His dark eyes fix on Damon, and Ric can see the wheels turning. It’s not the first time that Damon has heard something that no one else has, or that only Caroline has - such as the zombie walkers stumbling out of Atlanta on Jake and Cassie’s heels.

“Not walkers,” Caroline is back in their circle so quickly that even Ric is startled and steps back. He knows how quiet she and Damon are and how they can move, and still sometimes they take him by surprise. When he looks back to where Damon was, the vampire is gone.

“Where -” Jake stops as Caroline holds her finger to her lips, mimicking Damon. Her eyes turn to the trees and Ric knows she’s trailing Damon although no one else can see or hear him.

The pained scream cuts through the night and then Caroline is gone in a streak of blonde hair, her parting word, “RV” hanging in the air.

“Where did she go?” Cassie asks, her voice rising and pitching.

Now is not the time to answer. The chill of Damon’s yell has cut him to the bone and he’s not the only one. Matt is pale, staring into the trees breathing heavily, fists clenched and Bonnie looks as though she’s torn between staying put and trying to follow Caroline. They all know that there _are_ worse things out there than zombies. Ric motions toward the RV. “Explain later. Let’s take to the RV.”

No one moves, so Ric barks it. Makes it an order. “RV! Now!”

“But Caroline is out there!” Matt protests.

“They can take care of themselves,” Ric says, and he hopes it’s true. The sound of snarls and growls cuts through the night. Ric hears trees protest and splinter under the pressure.

“That’s not walkers.” Jake looks from the trees to Ric. His gaze turns to the gun in his hand as there’s another loud crack of wood splintering and an increase in snarling and snapping.

“No,” Ric agrees with a slow nod. They know that there are other things out there. They just haven’t encountered them. Haven’t thought about the possibility of it and what it might truly mean. Ric glances up, checking that the moon isn’t full and then he’s hurrying to the Hummer. The back is quickly popped open and the weapons that aren’t for zombies are hauled out.

“Vampires right?” Matt asks at his side, as he watches Ric pull out the gun with wooden bullets.

He checks the chamber and makes certain that it’s loaded, “Can you shoot this?” Ric shakes his head and laughs, recalling _whom_ it was who shot Damon in an attempt to rescue Caroline. “Never mind, take it.”

“Vampires?” Cassie is there, behind them. “Vampires don’t exist.”

“And two months ago neither did zombies.” Ric snaps one of his wrist shooters into place, wincing as the sound of fighting escalating. _We might already be too late to do any good._ “Argue with me later, Cassie.” Ric hands the girl a vervain grenade. “It’s a grenade. Just like in the movies. Pull the pin,” Ric turns it, indicating the pin, “Toss it at the ones with black eyes and fangs.”

“But not Caroline,” Matt tells her. A quick glance at Ric and he adds a belated. “Or Damon.”

“This is crazy!”

“No.” Damon crouches on the ground behind them. He’s covered in blood and looks like hell, but somehow he doesn’t fall over, balancing one battered and bleeding hand against the ground. Ric doesn’t know if the rest of the blood is his. He doesn’t _want_ to know. “This is the end of the world. Humans aren’t the only ones with food supply worries.”

“How many?” Ric asks. He peeks around the Hummer and sees Caroline, blonde hair dark with something he’s certain isn’t blood. She’s standing between Bonnie and Jake, her attention on the woods. The former cheerleader appears to be in better shape than Damon.

“I don’t know.” Damon pops his shoulders back and winces, then pushes to his feet. His movements answer the questions that Ric isn’t asking. Damon is hurt. If Ric knows the older vampire, he took the full brunt of most of the attack. “We took out two of them, then we fell back because they fanned out. They’re going to be coming.” Damon reaches past Ric and grabs a stake in each hand. He meets Cassie’s shocked and horrified eyes, “Throw them. They go boom.”

If there was time, Ric would feel sorry for the young woman. There is no time for it because the remainder of the vampires pour out of the trees surrounding them. Ric does a quick count, coming away with a count of seven. Not bad odds, if they’re hungry; not good odds if they’ve fed recently.

“Trying to keep all the spoils, little girl?” One taunts Caroline. “Can’t share a little?”

“Over my dead body,” Caroline tosses back and it must be a signal because the vampires move as one.

The one nearest to Bonnie goes flying into the trees, Bonnie’s hand held up in front of her. Gun fire fills the night, and Ric slides a stake into place as Matt twists out of the way of an incoming vampire.

After that, the element of surprise is gone and all hell breaks out.

When the smoke clears, Bonnie is unconscious, blood streaming out of her mouth, her nose, her ears and eyes and Caroline is frantically checking over her body. A few paces away, Damon lies as still as death, his body covered with blood, but far more pale than Ric’s seen the vampire since his near brush with death.

There are also seven gray ashen vampire corpses scattered through their makeshift camp, two burned to a crisp.

“No!” Matt’s shout is all the warning before he tackles Jake to the ground, knocking the stake from the other man’s hand. “Are you crazy?”

Jake’s fist shoots up, aimed at Matt’s jaw and sends the boy sprawling backwards.

Caroline looks up, eyes black, the spider web of veins spreading out and Ric puts himself between Jake and Caroline. “Matt, you okay?”

“Yeah,” Matt’s voice is shaky, but out of the corner of his eye, Ric can see the jock shaking it off.

“They’re . . . they’re . . .” Jake seems at a loss for words and pulls up his gun.

“They’re vampires, yes,” Ric says very calmly. “But Caroline and Damon are on our side. _Damon_ is hurt because he was defending us. They’re our friends, and I’m not going to let you hurt either of them.”

Jake’s eyes are wild. His world has been turned upside down again. Ric knows how he feels, but he can’t convey that. Not here. Not now. Not yet. His gun hand trembles.

“You are going to have to kill me to get to Caroline or Damon,” Ric says. His voice sounds calm to his ears, but inside his heart is pounding so loudly, he’s amazed it doesn’t explode in his chest.

“And me,” Matt adds. He’s picked himself up off the ground and is crouching by Damon’s body. It’s a turning moment, and Ric wishes he could appreciate it more.

The gun arm falls and Ric releases the breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

“What happened to Bonnie?” From a few feet behind Jake, Cassie hugs her mid-section. There’s blood on her throat, a partial bite wound and she looks perhaps more scared than she did before.

“She’s unconscious.” Caroline breaks her silence. She knew enough not to speak while Ric had his standoff with Jake. “But she’s alive. I’ve never seen this before, but I heard about it. She needs to recharge, I guess.” Caroline hoists her best friend up in her arms like she weighs next to nothing and starts toward the RV. “I’m going to clean her up and put her to bed.”

With Bonnie looking like a broken doll in her arms, Caroline glances over at Damon and worries her lower lip with her teeth. “Matt? Can you come with me? I can give you something for Damon?”

Matt glances at Ric.

“You go on,” Ric nods. “I can handle the clean up out here.”

He’s not talking about the vampire corpses.


End file.
